Kendra woke at five like she always did. She swished her mouth with Scope, sniffed a sports bra she found on her floor and pulled it on. She never sniff-tested her running shorts; she wore only clean ones ever since she’d read an article about yeast infections in a fitness magazine. A yeast infection could seriously impede her training.
The sky was a fiery haze, and the air was cool and dry. Quail cooed, and a few cicadas warmed up their buzzers. After April, this was the only comfortable time to run. It was too hot to get a good workout later in the day. Today, as she began her run, hitting the hill, she saw a small pack of coyotes loping back to wherever they hid during daylight hours. One of them carried a floppy, car-smashed jackrabbit in its mouth. The coyotes’ small size and skinniness always surprised her. The flattened rabbit was almost as big as the coyote carrying it.
Kendra welcomed the sensation that burned through her quads and calves the first five or so times she ran up the hill. It felt like her legs were yawning. She had stretched this morning, but there were areas deep in her muscles that didn’t ignite until she was really running, bounding up the hill. She ran the same length of road forty times—a stretch of faded asphalt that wound up a sharply angled foothill at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains—but she rarely became bored. There were often new things to see, subtle changes: a skid mark, an ant-covered dead lizard, new trash, a burst of wildflowers or blooming cacti.
But there were no noticeable changes along the road today. No neighbors were awake yet. Just yellow porch lights. Some mornings, Mrs. Hunter was out walking, wearing a stupid flowered housedress and old Keds sneakers, sometimes carrying a toaster or iron. But that was only if she hadn’t slept at all the night before. She’d smile at Kendra sheepishly, and say, “I couldn’t sleep.” Kendra never had the time or the patience to talk with the crazy insomniac woman. Kendra would only nod, force a smile, and continue running up or down the hill.
Kendra finished her forty hills quickly today, and chugged a protein shake before she went back to sleep, still wearing her sweaty workout gear.
She had planned on waking at nine, working her chest and back, and later swimming laps at the club, but her mother, Joyce, woke her thirty minutes into her deep slumber, shaking her shoulder.
Kendra saw Joyce’s face, loose and sagging, and she breathed in her familiar scent of baby powder and Camel Lights, but somehow it didn’t all quite coalesce into reality, and she reached up and grabbed a handful of Joyce’s dry hair. Kendra tugged and shook Joyce’s head. Joyce screamed. She saw Joyce’s dental work, the small hairs in her nose. Kendra knew she was hurting Joyce, that it was wrong, that it was abnormal, but she didn’t want to stop. She didn’t stop until Gene, her father, grabbed her wrists and pinned them against her headboard.
“Kendra,” he said calmly, staring into her eyes, “you hurt your mother.”
“Kendra, you hurt me,” Joyce added from across the room.
“But,” Kendra said, relaxing her arms, no longer fighting her father’s grasp, “you totally scared the shit out of me, waking me like that.”
“I yelled your name and you didn’t budge,” Joyce said. “I thought for a second you were dead.”
Gene released her and stood above her bed. Kendra saw he had nicked himself on the underside of his chin while shaving. His face and neck were very tanned from spending hours on the golf course at La Paloma, where he gave golf lessons to guests, most of whom were senior citizens from New Jersey or Canada. The non-inked parts of his arms were ghostly white, in startling contrast to his face and hands. He had to wear long sleeves at work to hide the blue and green smears of tattoos left over from his days as the drummer of U.P.S., an early eighties punk band whose full name was “Useless Pieces of Shit.”
“If you don’t start hitting the weights, Gene,” Kendra told him, “I’ll be able to take you by August, I swear.”
He laughed. “Oh, really?” he said.
“Can I have privacy?” Kendra said, pulling her comforter up to her neck. “Could you two get out and let me sleep? You’re screwing my schedule way up.” She flipped her pillow, exposing the cool side, and hugged it. She sighed.
“The toy show starts in two hours,” Joyce said. “Get up.”
“Get up,” Gene said, “and help her load the van.”
“You help her,” Kendra said. “Or Thomas. Make him.”
“Thomas has been packing the board games and lunch boxes for over an hour,” Joyce said. “Get up.”
“Ten minutes,” Kendra moaned. “I swear.”
As Kendra and Joyce walked into the bustling convention center, each carrying a plastic crate of collectible toys, a man approached them. He was stout, and sported a trimmed Vandyke beard.
As he rocked from his heels to his toes, he pointed his chubby finger at Joyce, and said above the din of haggling toy dealers, “You’ve been trashing my name all over the Star Wars community.”
“If you want to sell touched-up R2D2s with bogus stickers, that’s your business,” Joyce said, “but don’t bitch to me about trashing your name.”
“Plussing as how,” Kendra added, “move your ass so we can set up.” She gripped the crate and flexed her forearms.
“I could have you banned from this show,” he said.
“Go set up your shoddy swap-meet crap and let us alone,” Joyce said. She pushed by him, knocking his shoulder with the crate.
Kendra followed her, also knocking the man’s shoulder, only more forcefully than her mother had.
“Lesbos,” he mumbled.
Kendra placed the crate on the floor and turned to the man. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“I thought so,” Kendra said. “She’s my mother, asshole.”
Just as Kendra and Joyce finished setting up the table, snapping together the plastic shelves and unpacking several boxes of toys, a spidery woman hurried over and began to examine the goods. Kendra recognized the woman, probably from a previous show. She moved in nervous jerks, always ricocheting from table to table. Skin clung to her bones like she was desiccated. Her lazy eye made her look deranged. Kendra could never look her in the eye because she didn’t know which one to look in.
The woman picked up a Liddle Kiddles coloring book. “How much?” she asked Kendra. The woman’s voice was deep and froggy, incongruous with her frail appearance.
“Twenty,” Kendra said.
“You give a dealer discount, honey?”
Joyce looked up from the floor where she was assembling a Barbie Jeep. “It’s thirty without the discount, Glynnis. It’s Liddle Kiddles.”
“I know what it is, but half the pages are colored in,” Glynnis said, flipping through the book. “This one’s torn.”
Glynnis held it up. The page depicted two big-headed midget dolls jumping rope. Kendra hated Liddle Kiddles. Of all the creepy doll lines from the sixties Joyce had versed her in, Liddle Kiddles were the creepiest. Their eyes were too big, and often their hair was scented—a rancid stink, like a two-week-old bouquet or a sick old woman. Once, Kendra discovered a shoe box full of Liddle Kiddles at a yard sale. They were good ones, even a few of the rare Kozmic Kiddles. She stuffed the box under a picnic table before Joyce could see it.
“It’s over thirty years old,” Joyce said to Glynnis. “They’re scarce.”
“I’ll give you fifteen,” Glynnis said. “I saw one on the Internet for less than that.”
“Eighteen,” Kendra said. “Is that okay, Joyce?”
“Eighteen,” Joyce said. “And that’s only because I’ve seen you at a lot of shows.”
Glynnis handed Kendra the eighteen dollars and walked off with the coloring book.
Before the show opened for the public at nine, Kendra and Joyce had sold over eight hundred dollars worth of toys: a set of three Monkees Halloween masks, a Man From U.N.C.L.E. lunch box, a Donny and Marie record player, a Major Matt Mason puzzle, a Brady Bunch board game, a Cher styling head …
Joyce had spent countless hours cruising dusty thrift stores in South Tucson, picking through the junk, searching for anything she could sell at one of these shows. She often dragged Kendra with her. It was getting tougher to find anything at the thrift stores within the city limits. The thrift store employees were on to it; they knew what things were worth, they knew the market value of even the most obscure collectible toys.
The Tanque Verde Swap Meet was somewhat better—if you got there when the clueless families were unloading their vans and station wagons. Dealers descended upon any new sellers that drove up to the Swap Meet, and rifled through their stuff, often before it was unloaded from their vehicle. Kendra accompanied Joyce to the Swap Meet and to the toy shows; Kendra’s counselor had said it might be a good way for Kendra to become involved in her mother’s life, to better understand her mother. In return, Joyce took Kendra to the movies every Sunday afternoon, and bought her fat-free frozen yogurt afterward.
Kendra hated the Swap Meet most of the time, especially during the summer, when everything was covered in hot dust and everyone was sweating out cheap beer. But she liked to elbow her way into someone’s van and find all the good stuff first. She was well-hated by the other Swap Meet vultures, and she preferred it that way, proud that she had established a reputation and intimidated people.
When Kendra announced to her counselor that she and Joyce could sell all the toys on the Internet much easier than by going to toy shows, her counselor asked, “Why do you think your mother would rather not do it that way?”
“Because she’s sometimes retarded,” Kendra said. “And I don’t mean that as an insult, because it’s true. And her name is ‘Joyce’ not ‘your mother.’”
“You never call her ‘Mom’ or ‘Mommy’ or anything like that?”
“Why?” Kendra said. Even as a toddler, she had called her mother by her name.
“She might prefer that. Have you discussed it with her?”
“Um, no,” Kendra said. “If she had a problem with it, I think she would have said something by now, don’t you?”
Today, Kendra quickly became sick of dealing with customers at the toy show. They’d either try to bargain down the prices, or pick up a toy, exclaim, “I had this when I was a kid,” and move on. Kendra knew most of the sales were clinched to the other dealers in the morning, which made her day-long sentence behind the table less bearable. She could be at the Tucson Racquet and Fitness Club, at the preacher bench, working her biceps. But she had pulled Joyce’s hair that morning. She had to behave rationally and kindly. If Gene brought it up later, she’d work harder to convince him that she’d been half-asleep when she attacked Joyce.
Joyce wasn’t any fun at these toy shows. She said Kendra needed practice in relating to customers, so she’d kick back and read true-crime paperbacks—until something sold. Then she’d tell Kendra the history of the sold toy: “I got that at a yard sale in Marana for a dollar.… That was in the box of Barbie stuff from that estate sale on Sabino Canyon.… I ordered that from that crook in Michigan.…”
A man approached the table. Kendra stupidly made eye-contact with him. He wore a Star Trek shirt, a velour V-neck like the crew of the Enterprise. “You have any Trek stuff?” he asked. Predictable.
“Just a few loose Megos,” she said, pointing to them, “and some figures from the Next Generation, still mint on cards.”
“I have a Kirk Mego, mint in box,” he said, grinning, standing excitedly on his toes.
“Am I supposed to be all impressed?” Kendra asked.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he looked over the displayed toys. He touched everything, made faces when he read the price tags. He picked up a Bozo the Clown gumball bank, and said, “They have this a few tables over for five dollars less, and it’s in better condition.”
“Then go buy it,” Kendra said.
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“Then shut up,” Kendra said. She stood, and stared deeply into his wide eyes, until he shuffled away.
She had learned to stare down people from a homeboy, a real one, Miguel. During lunch periods, she and Miguel used to sneak off campus to Dairy Queen, where they’d sit at a red plastic table and smile at each other. He’d eat a chili dog and fries. Kendra would chew through two or three protein bars and enjoy watching him devour his real food. He had the best teeth, so white they nearly glowed. Whenever some other homeboy or redneck would look twice at Kendra, or have the audacity to approach her, Miguel’s face would tense, his lip would curl a little, and he’d stare at the guy until the guy walked away. It worked every time, and soon Kendra began to stare down the Latina chicks who were into Miguel. Their fanned up bangs and black lipstick didn’t intimidate her. The stare-down worked every time on them, too. After eating, Kendra and Miguel would get high, or have sex in the tall weeds behind the bagel shop. Kendra could taste his meal on his warm tongue. Too bad he had stopped coming to school.
* * *
“He might’ve bought something,” Joyce said without looking up from her book. “You were rude.”
“Sorry,” Kendra said. “I’m gonna walk around now. You want a drink?”
“No. Hurry back.”
When Kendra first started working at the toy shows, she was vaguely interested in it all. She thought it was cool that Joyce could buy a toy for fifty cents and sell it for fifty dollars. The toys from the sixties or seventies were funny, but they held no honest nostalgia for her. She had watched hours of reruns—Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough—but she never connected with them. Watching them was a way of staying out of trouble for the three hours after she got off the school bus, until Joyce or Gene made dinner. The reruns were something to look at while she worked out. Even the toys from her own childhood didn’t mean much to her. She had learned what toys were worth, and like Joyce, she wasn’t sentimental about them.
Kendra felt it in her gut when she saw the Liddle Kiddles coloring book displayed at Glynnis’s table. Glynnis had propped it up with a small stand, and placed it under a Lucite box. A little pink sign read, SUPER RARE $100.
Kendra muscled through a few women looking at some Barbie clothes, and said, “You’re trying to rip my mom off.”
“What are you talking about?” Glynnis said.
“You know,” Kendra said.
“The coloring book?” Glynnis stepped back and crossed her thin arms over her chest like a mummy.
“I could kick your ass so easy,” Kendra said.
The two women customers dropped the Barbie clothes and rushed away.
Glynnis stepped back farther, leaned against another dealer’s table. “I don’t have to take this,” she said. Her deep voice quavered a little. “I don’t have to take this at all.”
Kendra clenched her fists, flexed her forearms. She breathed deeply through her teeth and closed her eyes. She wanted to chuck the Lucite box at Glynnis. She wanted to do it so bad, her fingertips tingled. Glynnis would topple onto the floor with a bloodied head. She’d kick and squirm, expose her weak, pale legs from under that tired Prairie skirt. Kendra might shove the whole table of toys on top of her. Then a rent-a-cop would run over, the rubber soles of his shiny boots squeaking on the floor like hungry puppies. Kendra would kick his ass, too. Maybe she’d twist his arm until she heard it crack like Thomas’s. She’d stuff a Barbie in his mouth, ask him if he played with Barbies—Malibu Tan Barbie, Dentist Barbie, Glitter Magic Barbie—or maybe Ken. She’d ask him if he played with Ken like the fag he was. Did he undress Ken? Check for a dick? Yes, I play with Ken, she’d make him say, and I always check for a dick.
When Kendra opened her eyes, Glynnis was cowering behind another dealer, a guy who sold only Hot Wheels. The guy was pretty thick, Kendra noticed. His muscles were big, and he had the right frame, but he needed some aerobic work to rid himself of his outer layer of fat. He needed some sun, too, and to maybe shave his furry arms to fully expose muscle definition.
Kendra looked past the Hot Wheels guy and told Glynnis, “Being as which I pulled her hair this morning, you’re lucky. Real lucky.”
“What are you talking about?” Glynnis said.
Merv had to fish a turd from the Kid Corner Splash Pool thirty minutes after he opened it. Children were screaming, fighting their way out of the knee-high water like there was a man-eating shark in there. A few kids clung to the pirate ship in the middle and cried. He ferried the crying kids across the water in a rubber boat, and gave their mothers and baby-sitters refund coupons. In addition to adhering to several other regulations, Merv was required to close the area for twenty-four hours after the turd was removed. In addition, he had to fill out a long checklist and a form on which he wrote, Pool evacuated and human fecal matter extracted with skimmer net and placed in biohazard bag at 10:36 A.M. This meant that there would be hundreds of smaller kids in the giant wave pool. His lifeguards had to stay alert. He cut across the bright green grass to warn them.
Annie sat on top of her lifeguard chair, hiding her golden skin from the killer sun under an umbrella, a ball cap, and the coconut SPF 40 sunscreen Merv could smell from where he stood below.
“What the hell happened to your head?” she asked Merv, removing her sunglasses.
“I bumped it,” he said.
“Did you go out after the Saddlehorn?”
“I got home a few hours ago,” Merv said.
“I won’t ask,” she said. She slid her sunglasses back on.
“The piss pond was turded again, so there’ll be tons of little kids over here. Don’t space out, and tell Timmy and Brett, too.”
“There’s hydrogen peroxide in the office,” Annie said. “For your head.”
“Thanks,” he said. He jogged away, but turned around and added, “Watch those kids.”
Annie smiled and waved.
If he were younger or she were older, he’d ask her out. She was smart, athletic, always in a good mood. She had this look about her, like she was tough, or like she knew something secret about Merv and was waiting for the most embarrassing time to bring it up. Always making an edge for Merv. He liked the way she handled herself around the other workers at Splash World. She had fit in with the group just a few days after she began working, knowing who she could tease and who to avoid. Merv had hired her sight unseen because he liked her voice on the phone; she made him laugh. She had called him in April from her college in Maine, said she was spending the summer in Tucson with her parents and she needed to make money. “Either you hire me at Splash World,” she had joked, “or I’m a subject in another medical study, and I just got rid of the burning rash from last summer.”
Merv stopped at Raymond, who had rolled his wheelchair to the edge of the wave pool so the water lapped over his twisted ankles. Raymond sat there every day, smiling, blocking the sun with his golf visor, greeting people who passed him with a dignified “Good day” in his vaguely British accent. He was a fixture at the park, and each morning, one of the Splash World employees helped him switch from his battery-powered deluxe wheelchair, to the more basic nonelectric one that he used when he enjoyed the wave pool. Merv was often the one who helped Raymond, first by hanging his sport coat on a hook in the employee locker room, careful not to wrinkle the fine silk or wool. Then he’d slide off Raymond’s shoes: black Gucci loafers, never scuffed, always well shined. Finally, he’d roll up Raymond’s trouser cuffs, neatly, four folds, about two inches each fold, exposing his white hairless legs. Raymond always produced a crisp twenty for Merv, a bill that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“How’s the water, Raymond?” Merv asked him today, placing his hand on Raymond’s shoulder.
“Perfect, Merv,” he said. “It’s so very lovely, despite the fact that one of those ruffians from security had to help me prepare this morning.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Merv said. “Rough night.”
“I noticed that horrible gash on your head,” Raymond said, “but decided it would be untoward to ask about it.”
A bit of drool had worked its way out the corner of Raymond’s mouth. Merv didn’t comment on it, figured it had something to do with the degenerative muscle disease Raymond suffered.
“An angry teenager threw a bottle at me from a truck,” Merv said. “He had good aim.”
“I’m starting to believe we all should carry pistols with us wherever we go,” Raymond said. “I never thought I would utter such a thing. I guess I’m a real American now.”
Merv climbed the wet metal stairs and took his post atop the Kamikaze, a 150-foot water slide—a straight-on steep lunge without any turns or twists. The sliders plunged head-first on their stomachs, rode special mats. If they pulled up on the front of their mats as they took off, they could catch air and heighten the detached, near-death feeling in their guts. While he was up there, it was Merv’s job to safely space each slider, and remind each of them not to pull up.
But some days Merv didn’t care. He’d robotically repeat, “Don’t pull up on the mat, keep your head down, and exit to the left.” He didn’t watch to see if they abided by the rules. They spaced themselves, they weren’t stupid about that, even the little kids, so there was no real chance of a collision at the bottom. And no one could catch enough air to flip over the sides of the slide, not even with a push-off from a friend at the top. He’d look at his watch and surprise himself. Hours slipped away unnoticed. Hundreds of sliders went by, and he warned them all, but he hadn’t been aware of any of them.
Today, as the sliders filed past him down the Kamikaze, he touched his sore head and thought of his mother as he had seen her early that morning: asleep on the couch in front of the snowy television, still wearing her work shoes. He had arrived home at three A.M., and she was snoring lightly in the living room, her mouth open unnaturally wide, like a frozen scream. She couldn’t sleep well—she hadn’t since Merv’s father died years ago. She fought sleeping-pill addiction twice, tried herbal concoctions, intense exercise, cutting all processed sugar from her diet. And Merv was right alongside her, installing lightproof shutters in her bedroom, clipping articles from magazines, fixing chamomile tea at night. Sometimes, at the end of the week, she’d be shuffling around the kitchen like a zombie, yawning, rubbing her eyes, nodding off as she stood at the counter making dinner, so ravaged-looking that Merv had to leave the house. Her sad, sunken eyes were frightening reminders of her mortality. He’d feel awful doing it, but at times like these, he’d escape to downtown Tucson, where he’d pull a stool up to the bar in the smoky Tap Room at Hotel Congress, and plug back Coors until he felt like walking through the spray-painted underpasses to Fourth Avenue, where he’d find someone he knew.
He’d probably do that tonight.