King Maybe (29 page)

Stinky, mercifully, stayed upstairs in the condo.

After he started the van, Ting Ting punched a button on the dash, and the sound of Vivaldi filled the car. It carried us back east on the 10 Freeway and then north through the Valley, and I guess I got lost in my thoughts for a bit, because when I came back, we were listening to one of Beethoven's later string quartets. I said, “That's good,” and Ting Ting nodded at me in the mirror. The van had three rows of seats. Eaglet and Ting Ting were in front, with Ronnie and me holding hands, more for comfort than anything else, in the middle row, and Garlin and Casey in the back. Garlin was still working.

Somewhere on either the 405 or the 5, Eaglet took charge, directing Ting Ting onto the 14, which was a new one to me, and from there into a maze of ever-smaller roads between taller and taller trees. By the time we were bumping over dirt, the sky was beginning to pale and the uppermost reaches of the trees were sharp, dark silhouettes.

“Hook right,” she said, “then stop.” Ting Ting pulled in beneath some thick-trunked coniferous trees. We got out, and Eaglet waited, a small flashlight in her hand, while Ting Ting pulled two shovels out of the back and I drew a long sigh, flexed the knee a couple of times, and picked up Suley. On her way past me in her chair, Garlin took Suley's ribboned hands and pressed them to her cheek. Then she said, “Motherfucker,” and followed Eaglet, who had started down an almost invisible path. Casey hesitated, and Garlin said, “Go on ahead, honey. I've rolled over rougher roads than this.”

“I'll stay behind you anyway,” Casey said, “if it's the same to you.”

“What about park rangers?” I asked.

“The budget crisis,” Eaglet said over her shoulder. “They've had to cut back. Anyway, they concentrate on the mountain trails, where people get hurt more often.”

I looked up for a moment, seeing the last of the night's stars, and then, after six or seven minutes on a sketchy path that eventually disappeared, I heard running water.

“Beautiful,” Ting Ting said. “But sad.”

We rounded some big, smooth boulders and came to a sort of dell. The pale bark of some ghost gum eucalyptus trees caught the glimmer of morning and reflected it, and about fifteen yards downhill I saw a dark stream, full of smooth rocks. I said, more to Suley than anyone else, “This is a good place.”

“Away from the path,” Eaglet said, “up there.” I followed Ting Ting uphill to a level area where he began to dig.

I was looking for a place to lay Suley down when Casey extended her arms and said, “I'll take her,” and I passed Suley to her. “Poor baby,” Casey said. “She don't weigh nothin'.”

“Only about four feet down,” Eaglet said. “If you go much deeper you'll hit rock.”

“Not deep enough,” I said. “Animals—”

“We're going to take care of that,” Eaglet said impatiently, and I let it go. While Ting Ting and I dug—Ting Ting faster than I—Eaglet and Ronnie went down to the stream and started doing something that involved a lot of bending over, and Garlin worked away on whatever she was making. I heard humming and saw Casey rocking Suley like a baby. The melody was something I hadn't heard in years, the old southern folk lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.” From the stream I heard the occasional clatter of stones being dropped on stones.

With my eyes on the dirt, I missed the coming of the light, and when my shovel hit stone and I looked up, I was surprised to see golden fire flecking the tops of the trees.

Ting Ting put his shovel aside and called down to Eaglet, “We finish.”

From the creek Eaglet called, “You know what to do,” and Ting Ting climbed out and extended a hand to me. The hole was a little more than waist-deep, and I was glad I only had to get out of it once.

Ting Ting said to Casey, “We take her now.”

Garlin said, “Wait a minute. I need to get up there,” and Casey gave Suley to me, very gently, and went down and navigated Garlin's chair up to the side of the grave. Garlin took a long look around and said to me, “Bring her over here.”

I went and knelt slowly beside Garlin's chair as Eaglet and Ronnie started up from the creek toward us, each carrying two or three good-size stones. They left a pile of wet stones behind them.

Garlin said, “Suley. Suley, listen to me.” She waited, and everyone went still. Even Eaglet stopped, a few yards away, holding the dripping stones. “We're putting you in the earth now,” Garlin said, “but you won't stay there. You're not a creature of the earth. You're a rider, and you're going to ride high and easy, I promise you. High and easy.” To me she said, “Lower her down, please.”

I rose and turned back to the hole we'd dug, carrying her as gently as I could. Ting Ting came over to help, but I said, “I'll do it,” and sat on the edge of the grave. Then, trying to avoid bending my bad knee more than absolutely necessary, I slid down into the hole and laid her there, faceup, and said, “Sorry I couldn't help you.” I rose and stood there for a moment, the breeze taking away whatever words I might have said, until Eaglet said, “We've got to finish now,” and I climbed back out, for the last time this time, and Ting Ting and I picked up our shovels.

Garlin said, “Wait.” Casey helped her maneuver the chair to the edge of the grave, and I saw for the first time what she'd been painting. It was an emerald field dropping down to a sea the color of Suley's eyes, and running full out, their manes flowing behind them, were four perfect horses. Garlin turned the picture toward Suley and said, “See it? We talked about it. L'Île des Chevaux,
remember
?
You can ride forever.”

She took the picture by one edge and brought out her lighter. The flame, when she touched it to the painting, was straight up and motionless, and I realized that for the first time in days there wasn't a breath of wind. Once the picture was fully aflame, she dropped it into the grave, and Ting Ting and I began to replace the dirt. After a foot of soil covered her, Eaglet and Ronnie began to lay river stones on top of it, and all of us but Garlin made trips to and from the streambed until the soil was covered by a layer two stones deep to animal-proof it. Ting Ting and I finished filling it in with more dirt, and then we all tamped it down, walking on it until the soil was packed and level.

No one spoke as we went back to the car. Even Eaglet looked pensive. To Garlin I said, “The Island of the Horses?”

“It has a strain of very fine Argentine horses that swam ashore from a shipwreck about a century ago.”

“Where is it? I asked. “Near Verdinha?”

“No,” Garlin said. “Much farther.”

PART SIX

MONEY SHOTS

We all respect [sincerity] in our friends and acquaintances, but Hollywood is willing to
pay
for it.

—Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel

30

Pisces

“It's kind of cool in a sick way,” Anime said from the backseat.

“Not from my perspective,” I said. We were heading south from the girls' headquarters in the storage unit toward Kathy and Rina's house, and running a little late for the party. This being Friday, there were twice as many cars on the road as usual. I don't know why that is, but it's a natural law as unyielding as gravity.

“I'm getting carsick,” Lilli said. She was trying to wrap Rina's present, which Anime and I had run out at the last minute to buy, so we could download some material on it.

“Gosh, dear,” Ronnie said to me, putting a matronly hand on my arm, “it's like having children of our own, isn't it?”

“Seriously,” Lilli said, “I'm about to spew.”

“Well, look up,” Anime said. “Anyway,” she said to me, catching my eyes in the mirror, “it won't be too gross. She claims she's vegan this week, so it'll be kind of green and stringy, but—”

“By all means, look up, honey,” Ronnie said, “In fact, give that thing to me and I'll finish it.”

“Drama queen,” Anime said to Lilli. She took the iPad and the wrapping paper from Lilli and passed them over the seat to Ronnie.

“
I
don't think it's cool either,” Lilli said, recovering instantly. “She's way too thirsty.”

I said, “Thirsty?”

“Needy,” Lilli said. “She's practically wringing her hands. Distressed little emo.”

“You should know all about that,” Anime said.

“I was
never
thirsty,” Lilli said. “I was never distressed.”

“Well,
I
was,” Anime said. “Until I found you.”

“Poor you,” Lilli said. “Not just gay but Chinese, too. And scrawny.”

“See, that's what I
mean
,” Anime said. “I know how that girl, that Patty, feels. She's stuck on the outside of the big window, and on the other side are all the kids who do things right, the kids who laugh at the right stuff, and know what to say, and look good, and don't get up every morning with a stomach ache like she does because she has to go to school, where everybody looks at her like she's a contagious birth defect.”

“Awwww,” Lilli said.

“And she's
not
thirsty,” Anime said. “She's not emo either, 'cause she's not just moping around all tragic. She's
doing
something about it.”

“And the person she's doing it to,” I said, “is my daughter.”

“Your daughter is undoubtedly cool,” Anime said. “But Lilli and me, if we were watching that channel and we didn't know you, or that she was your daughter, guess whose side we'd be on?”

“Lilli and I,” Ronnie and I said in unison, and then I said, “You don't see that she's hurting people?”

“Well, I'll tell you,” Lilli said, “people like her, like Patty, they get hurt every fucking day they're alive. Anime and me—
I
, I, okay?—if we didn't have each other, we'd be getting hurt every day, too. But you, I'll bet you
liked
high school. You've got the skill set for it.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“You know, glib, overconfident, not bad-looking? Giving the impression you don't give a shit about what anybody thinks. I mean, how many times a week when
you
were in high school did you get stuck between two people, like on a bus or something, who were talking about a bunch of parties you didn't get asked to? How many hundred times did you work up the nerve to say hi to some kid who looked through you like you were made out of air? And then, when he and his friends had all passed you, they started laughing?”

“Never.”

“I did,” Ronnie said.

I said, “In which city?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Ronnie said, but she was smiling. “Not you two, just him. I know what you're talking about.”

“Listen,” I said to the kids. “You don't know this, but early this morning I buried someone—a kid, really—whose parents turned her out at thirteen.”

Anime said, “Was this part of what happened last night?”

Lilli said, “They turned her out of the house?”

“Yes,” I said to Anime. “No, Lilli.
Out.
Pimped her to people in TV and movies who could give her parts so the parents could spend the money she made, in bed and on the set. I have to tell you, compared to that, not getting invited to parties doesn't qualify.”

Anime leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. “If you'd been a different kind of kid, you'd be able to see it from Patty's viewpoint. She sees Rina, she sees a privilege zone, a permanent blue day at the beach with calm seas. She doesn't think Rina even knows what it means to hurt. So
what
if Rina loses that guy, whatever his name is? She's still in the
circle
, right? Still beautiful, still popular, still everything Patty's never been, but now Patty is
friends
with her, kind of. She's on her way in. That's what this whole thing—the channels and everything—that's what it's about. The way she sees it, she hurts
all the time
, and if Rina has to suffer like . . . I don't know, an ingrown toenail for Patty to come up a couple of levels . . . well, kids like Patty who are watching the channel, they're going to think—”

“The end justifies the means,” Lilli interrupted. “Machiavelli, right?”

“Close,” I said. “Not exact, but—”

“Close enough for me,” Lilli said.

“You're talking about morality,” I said. “You're saying that Patty is
justified
in doing this to Rina because Patty's gain somehow, on some obscure moral scale, outweighs Rina's loss.”

“Exactly,” Lilli said.

“Well, Machiavelli was way beyond that. He wasn't interested in moral scales at all—he was talking about public perception. When someone succeeds, he says, the means by which he succeeded will always be judged by the hoi polloi to be praiseworthy, because the hoi polloi is smart enough to side with power. Doesn't make any difference to Machiavelli whether the prince is right or wrong, honorable or not, as long as he's successful.”

“Or the princess,” Anime said. “Remember, two channels: the Prince and the Princess.”

“So these kids are all over the country?” Ronnie said.

“It's not like there's a million of them,” Anime said. “The channel—”

“You keep calling it a channel,” Ronnie said.

“It is. It's an
unpublished channel
on YouTube. Two of them, actually. You can't find it through YouTube the way you'd find . . . I don't know, your favorite Michael Bublé song—”

“Oh, please,” Ronnie said.

Lilli said, “You have to know the actual URL—you know, the http et cetera you type into the browser window. We didn't have much time to look at it, but it seems like there's nine boys in the channel on Mach One, the Prince, and about twelve girls on Mach Two, the Princess. They've got some skills, too, these kids. Sometimes they've got two or even three cell phones secretly recording video at the same time so they can cut things together on Pro Tools. I've seen worse-quality stuff on TV.”

Ronnie said, “And what they're recording is . . . ?”

“Unpopular kids turning things upside down. Getting in with popular kids. Fucking with them. It's like serials. There's a few new minutes on every story every week, all these stories going on at the same time. The thing where Patty and her drizzly little friend saw Rina's BF holding hands with that hashtag hottie, what's her name?”

“Denise,” Anime said. “What a numbskull.”

“Yeah, but hot. So that took like three chapters to set up, one where Patty explains what she's going to do, right to the camera like some plotter on
Big Brother
, and then two, she talks Denise into it, not that it would be hard to talk Denise into anything, and then three, when she and her tagalong see them together.”

“Did they actually film Rina?” Ronnie said.

I said, “They did. I saw it when Anime was setting up the iPad.”

“And then four, the big payoff,” Lilli said. “The money shot. Her and the lapdog are in Rina's room, and Patty tells Rina about how the BF is messing with this other girl, and then the lapdog backs her up and Rina calls the BF—”

“His name is Tyrone.”

“—and breaks up with him, and then Rina gets weepy, and Patty and the tagalong are, like, comforting her.”

Ronnie said, “How did they
film
all that?”

“They had their phones on video, and Patty's lens was sticking out of her pocket and the sidekick's was on a table in Rina's room, propped up on something. They'll be filming this party today like it's
Survivor
. This is triumph time.”

“And you guys think this is okay,” I said.

“We know you, and we think your daughter is probably nice,” Lilli said. “But if everybody was strangers? Yeah, we'd be down with it. You bet.”

Ronnie said, “They're selling subscriptions?”

“Looks like,” Lilli said. “The audience builds by word of mouth. But it's more than a show, you know? They think of themselves as, like, an underground, like revolutionaries. They think they're going to show a million loser kids how to infiltrate the ranks of the local cools. Like it even matters.”

I said, “It matters to Rina.”

°°°

“We're about five
minutes away,” I said into the phone. “Are you sure you want me to do this in front of everyone?”

“I want Rina to see what this little monster did to her,” Kathy said, “and I want the other kids to see it, too. They need to know who she is, this Patty, or she'll just start over again with one of them.”

“No she won't,” Anime said from the backseat. I had the phone on speaker so I could use it hands-free.

“Who's that?” Kathy said.

“Anime Wong.”

“Is that a joke? Anna May Wong was an oldtime movie—”

“No, it's her name. Spelled differently.”

“Patty's gotten kicked out of two schools for this already,” Anime said. “If you catch her, I'll bet she quits, because she'll probably get expelled if she doesn't.”

“Anime and her friend Lilli are the people who figured this out,” I said, “and if there are questions, they're the ones who can answer them.”

“How old are they?”

“About Rina's age.”

“Do you have any friends your own size?”

“I've got Ronnie,” I said. “I think she's friends with me right now.”

“Hi, Kathy,” Ronnie said.

Kathy said, “Oh, good. Someone for
me
to talk to.”

“Wow,” Rina said
at the front door, checking their hair. “You guys are a
couple
?”

Anime said, “You
got
it. Your father didn't.”

“We try not to let him know how dense— Oh,
hi
, Dad.”

“Hey, Rina. How is it?”

She tried on a smile that didn't fit. “It's, like, meh. Kind of like life.”

“You're not old enough to think life is meh.”

Kathy appeared in the hall behind Rina, looking frazzled, but managed a smile at Ronnie, who returned it.

“I'm a lot older than I was a week ago,” Rina said.

“Well,” I said, “we're going to see what we can do about that.”

Anime said, “We brought a time machine, sort of.”

“I really like the hair thing,” Rina said.

“Come on, come on in,” Kathy said. Now that we were down to it, she was nervous. She can't handle conflict, unless it's with me.

We went into the living room. There were only seven or eight kids there, because Tyrone's friends were missing. It was pretty glum, for a party. A lopsided cake with some unlit candles was being ignored on the dining-room table, a few presents were scattered here and there, and some crap music—to my ears anyway—was playing, just loud enough to be irritating. The party seemed to have fallen into one of those uncomfortable group silences that always threaten to go on forever, or at least until all the adults leave.

Rina introduced Anime and Lilli to the room while I looked at Patty, sitting in the chair I'd usually occupied when I lived there. She had her cell phone hanging around her neck in a little leather holster suspended on a lanyard, and the camera lens peeked just over the top of the holster. She was shorter and more ordinary-looking than I'd thought she'd be, in spite of a skin condition bad enough to earn her the awful nickname, Leatherface, that Lilli had used. She looked sour, as though she smiled only when something dicey happened to someone else. I could see an unpleasant-looking adult trying to push her way through the still-soft adolescent face, and her eyes, as they bounced from Anime and Lilli back to Rina and the others in the room, gave away what it was that would eventually make that adult so unpleasant: want. Absolutely everyone in the room had something Patty Gribbin wanted: friends, self-assurance, grace, wit, clear skin. Lilli's word
thirsty
came to me, and once again I had a pang over what I was about to do.

Then she looked at me and held my gaze in a way that felt oddly like a challenge, as though she knew why I was there. I went over to her.

“You're Patty, right? I'm Rina's dad.”

“I figured,” she said. “You look like her.”

“Really? I've always thought she looked more like her mother.”

“Right in the middle,” Patty said. “She's got both of you all over her face.”

I said, “Happy birthday.” And I reached down and put my finger over the lens on her phone.