The Subprimes (17 page)

The vehicles stopped, a passenger's-side window rolled down. Sargam stepped around and the gusts of air-conditioning blowing out felt decadent. A man with a thick jaw, narrow face, and sturdy nose looked down on her from his perch in the vehicle.

Sargam could see herself in the man's mirrored sunglasses. She looked tiny.

“Why, hello, missy.”

“Can I help you?” Sargam asked.

“Who am I speaking to?”

“Sargam.” She held out her hand.

The man ignored her proferred hand.

“And are you the lady we've been hearing about?”

“I'm not sure what that means.”

The man nodded. “I mean, are you the queen bitch around here? We've heard about this place. Came to see it for ourselves. Heard about a town full of subprimes squatting in some Ryanville of abandoned homes. Pretty little lady in charge, that must be you.”

Sargam did not respond.

“Everyone we see,” the man said, “seems to be running off. So, since you came out and hailed us, I figure that you, you must be her, and this . . . this must be your place.”

“Not my place. Our place. People helping people,” Sargam said. “Can I ask your name?”

“I'm Cord,” the man said.

“And you're just sightseeing here?” Sargam said. “What line of work are you in?”

“I work for an investor.”

“And your interest here?” Sargam said.

“I could ask you the same question,” Cord said.

“We're folks who didn't have any place else to go. And we're not hurting anyone here.”

“Be that as it may. We may be at cross purposes here. This land, these houses, I have to hand it to you—Sargam, right?—they ain't worth the wood it took to build 'em. But that's not what we're interested in, now is it? What interests HG is under the land. There's shale oil down there.”

“What does that mean?”

“What
does
that mean? I would think it means some changes around here.”

The window silently rose and Sargam was again staring at her own reflection in the tinted glass.

THAT NIGHT, AT THE CAMPFIRE,
after the men came back and washed and had their dinner, and the kids were out playing soccer, almost every man and woman in the community gathered, sitting on logs or standing, their faces gazing anxiously up toward where Sargam perched on a battered filing cabinet. The transformation of Valence was evident in the size of the crowd; over four hundred adults were now there. Landscaped ground, the terraced fields, the irrigation ditches, the fences built to keep foraging animals off the produce, the heavy cooking pots over a half-dozen fires—that population had required more infrastructure. More houses had been repaired, windows formerly boarded up now open with mesh screens, doors replaced, back porches rebuilt.

The men and women were proud of themselves and of their community. They had accomplished all this without credit
ratings or cell phones or the Internet. It was all sweat and toil, but it was theirs. Or so they had come to believe.

Sargam called the gathering to attention and began speaking, her words echoing outward so that everyone could hear her report of the interaction with the men in the armored SUVs. That HG Extraction, a division of Pepper Industries no less, seemed interested in Valence. But so far, that was all just talk.

“Until we hear further,” she said, “we don't assume anything. We keep working up at Placer. And we keep bringing in the harvest and working on the pump and the fields. The kids keep going to school. Valence is our home now, and I don't know about you, but to me it feels good to have a home.”

There was cheering, followed by the DJ starting up the wheels of steel with the old Primal Scream track “Come Together,” and Darren brought out a few trash cans full of ice, cold beer, and wine. Solar-cell-powered lamps cast the area around the DJ in yellow light. Artificial light was a special treat in Valence, and immediately suggested festivities.

Sargam shot him a look. “You're blowing our money on booze?”

“It's Friday night. Let them have a party,” Darren said. “We may not have one for a while.”

“Some of these guys have to be at work up at Placer tomorrow,” Sargam said.

“Come on, dance with me,” Darren said.

THE KIDS HAD PLAYED SOCCER
until it was dark and come up to where the campfire was blazing and the grown-ups were drinking and dancing in the flickering light. There were pitchers of lemonade for the kids, but a few of the older ones stole beers from the trash can and made shandies. Most of the adults
were themselves too tipsy to notice, and in the firelight and the shadows cast by the dancers, it was hard to see who was doing exactly what. Atticus helped himself to a few Coors, and even though the men noticed and knew he wasn't legal, they had put in enough full days with him up at Placer to know he did a man's work, so they wouldn't deny him a grown-up's pleasure. He made his way down the side of the house and around to the front, where there had been DJ parties back when the community was small enough to fit in a front yard. Vanessa was waiting for him by the front step, sitting beneath where there had once been a light fixture but was now nothing but a red-and-black exposed wire.

“Hey, babe,” Atticus said. “Did you miss me?”

Vanessa smiled. “You wish.”

He sat down beside her on the step.

She tensed up.

He turned toward her and bent down to plant a kiss.

Vanessa was not expecting the gesture of affection, and when she turned to see if anyone was watching, her forehead collided against his chin.

“Ow,” she said. “God.”

Atticus mumbled, “Sorry,” and handed her the can.

She sipped it tentatively. She'd never been fond of beer, but tonight seemed special. The DJ parties were the only time when Valence felt like a real place. You could squint and sort of imagine you were at a real party somewhere in the hills above Los Angeles or at a rave out in the desert.

“What did you do today?” Atticus asked.

“Helped my mom. Cleaned. Brought in about a ton of carrots. Look at my hands. They're orange.”

He took her hands, smiled at her, and then held them up to his mouth and licked her palms.

“Atticus! Eeeww,” she shouted. But she did not pull her hands away. His tongue was cold from the beer.

He laughed, released her hands, and took a sip of his beer. “You should see this berm we've built up there in Placer. It's as high as those hills,” he said, pointing to the foothills to the west, near where they had been lying that morning. “A pile of black pellets, like a castle wall, keeping out the muck they're pumping from that well.”

“What do you do?”

“I haul sacks of this stuff, shovel it out, bag after bag. They haul them in by the semi. No matter how high we dig and haul, the next day, we have to dig and haul more. It's hot. Hot as hell. But they say they're building a new tracked rig, a monster on tank tracks that they can roll right up to a site, then bore, drill, and pump. I don't know.”

Vanessa didn't seem interested.

“Hey, let's take a walk.”

“I know what you want to do.”

“And you don't?”

She did, actually. What they had started that morning was a project of sorts, and she felt the more they worked on it, the better it would get. But she wanted to talk a bit more first.

“Let's take a walk,” she said. “An actual walk.”

They stood, brushed off their butts, and strolled down the dirt path that would have been the paved walk from the front door if this house had ever been finished. They turned away from the noise, the DJ beats, and the whooping of people drinking and dancing. As they drifted farther away from the noise and artificial light, the desert night closed in around them, with only the canopy of white stars, a half-moon, and the whitewash of house walls to guide them up the street. They walked toward the off-ramp from the highway, Atticus already
thinking of how he would loop them around and then come down Las Casas, back up to the hills and their little spot in the rice grass.

They saw the flashlight beams swaying with the strides of men and assumed, at first, that these were fellow residents making their way to the gathering. Then they heard a dog barking, followed by a grunted shushing and the crunching of boots against rocky dirt.

Finally came the silhouettes of thick-shouldered men walking along the front yards of Bienvenida. Vanessa and Atticus froze, hoping they hadn't been detected.

“Cops,” Atticus said.

“What are they doing here?” Vanessa said. “We never have cops here.”

“We have to get back to tell everyone,” Atticus said.

But the lights were already upon them, a half-dozen bright yellow beams causing them to shade their eyes with their hands.

“Stay right there, subprimes,” said one of the men. They were in black uniforms with reflective lime-green piping up the sleeves and down the pant legs.

Atticus and Vanessa were struck silent by the apparent authority of these men, and they both had been on the run with their families long enough to know that these encounters with police, private or public, always ended badly for subprimes.

“We're not doing anything,” Vanessa said. “We have a right to be out walking.”

A voice behind the lights grunted. “They're just kids.”

“This one looks like a woman to me.”

“Hey.” Atticus stepped forward. “Watch it.”

“Or what, subprime? What are you gonna do?”

Vanessa took Atticus's hand to hold him back.

“Stay here, subprimes, we're taking a stroll ourselves.”

The men filed past them, their black uniforms and German army–style riot helmets scratching and clicking as they went.

SARGAM SAW THE MEN IN
uniform march in, a half-dozen in riot gear, and the dog on the leash. One of them, a large dark-haired man with a mustache, his helmet strapped tightly, ordered the DJ to cut the music. When the DJ didn't comply, he found the power cord and ripped it from its connection to an extension cable. The music died and those few who had not yet noticed the uniformed intrusion now did.

Sargam stepped forward. “I'm not sure you were invited to our little party.”

“This is private property,” the Hispanic man said. “This is HG Extraction land. And you subprimes have got to go.”

“We're not hurtin' anyone,” shouted a woman.

Sargam asked, “What are they aiming to do with the land?”

“Not your business,” the officer said. “They have clear title. They don't owe you, or me, an explanation.”

“When you say ‘they' . . . you mean you aren't HG Extraction?”

The dark-haired man pursed his lips. “We're doing our job, lady.”

Another of the uniformed men stepped forward. “We don't have to explain nothing. We've been hired by HG, which is all you need to know. You, all of you, have got to go.”

“Or what?” Sargam said. “You're going to run us off? There's six of you. And look at us, we are a community . . .”

She held her arm out behind her to indicate the hundreds, staring in angry silence at the uniformed men, who suddenly became aware of how badly they were outnumbered. Even the dog took on a less menacing posture, slinking down onto its stomach.

Darren, the DJ, Jeb, and a few dozen men were inching closer to the campfire, closer to the uniformed men, who began staring anxiously at each other.

“You're not doing anything tonight,” Sargam said. “Nobody is going anywhere. I expect we'll be hearing from you again soon. But for now I think it would be best if you return to whoever sent you and told them there's nothing in this here desert but a few thousand rattlesnakes.”

The crowd around her began cheering and whooping. Atticus had returned and reattached the power cable and the music came back up, the same Primal Scream song again, “Come Together.”

The community resumed dancing and the guards departed, followed by a few dozen men, as well as a several kids, all tracking them to the highway. Atticus and Vanessa walked with them, and before the column ascended the off-ramp, the large dark-haired man turned toward Atticus and said, “We'll be back for you subprimes.”

While Jeb watched the men go, Bailey was watching Atticus and Vanessa, and noticed the ease of their manner with each other, and Vanessa's greater confidence and swagger.

“Honey,” she said to Jeb, “we need to have a talk with our daughter. And you need to have a talk with Atticus.”

Jeb still saw his daughter as a child. “Why?”

“Because your little girl is becoming a woman, and fast.”

A
RTHUR MACK SAT IN HIS
rental Ford at the end of El Medio Avenue, staring at the waves breaking near Gladstones and the oil platforms that clotted the whole bay from Point Dume to Palos Verdes. At one point he had taken pride in his involvement in that great American industry. By selling those futures swaps, those C3DS3s, he helped enable great companies like Pepper Petroleum and HG Extraction to erect those oil rigs and extract that precious oil and gas and coal and all that great stuff that we need to keep driving our cars and invading other countries and, hell, to keep making great TV shows about beached whales. Arthur didn't quite get the connections between Pepper Industries and Pastor Roger and himself, except that they were all on the same side, and that that side was
winning
. Now the important thing was to stay on Pastor Roger's winning team, because that team would keep him out of jail and set him back up in business and allow
him to become, as Pastor Roger would say, a victor, not a victim.

He dialed Steven Shopper.

“I've made contact with my family,” he told the Texan, “and my wife, she isn't so happy to see me. I saw the girls, though, and, well, there's a lot going on, but they're okay. There's been some issues, with, like, they were attacked.”

“Attacked?”

“By a coyote. Ginny was, and Gemma, she was attacked too and bit. She's got a shiner and some scars, and you have to wonder, you know, if a woman who lets her daughter get attacked by wild coyotes is such a great mother, and if that is such a great place for the girls to be, right?”

“You make a valid point.”

“So, I'm trying to fix this, and put my family back together like Pastor Roger wanted, and I thought maybe if Gemma and the girls, if they could just meet Pastor Roger, then they would understand that we all need to be together and how important family is, right? Because it's really important to Pastor Roger.”

“And to you,” Steven Shopper said.

“Yes, to me, of course. Family is everything. I mean, I miss my girls and all that.”

“The pastor will be in Nevada this week.”

“He's going to Vegas?”

“He will be blessing the good work the Pepper Sisters are doing, extracting fuel from God's bounteous Earth. He blesses the sites before they frack.”

“So he's not going to Vegas?”

“He will be blessing some new fracking sites.”

“Oil!” Arthur said, finally understanding.

“Yes,” Steven Shopper explained and then mentioned a few sites, including towns called Placer and Valence, which Arthur had never heard of.

“I'll send you the information of where the pastor will be. Perhaps your family could join you and experience for themselves the blessed wisdom of Pastor Roger.”

Arthur drove to Bowdoin and then down to Temescal Canyon and the Pacific Coast Highway. There they were, those damn whales, and all the tourists flocking to see them. Arthur had missed most of the first season of
Whale Watch
, but he knew from listening to Pastor Roger that the whales were making a gesture of surrender so that we could drill wherever we wanted in the sea. More oil! What could be wrong with that?

He dialed Gemma, surprised when she picked up.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

She was silent.

“Um, well, I was thinking I'd like to take the girls out for dinner. Buy them a steak.”

Gemma said, “I should say no. I should tell you to go fuck yourself. You've left us broke, Arthur. You're a deadbeat. You—”

“Let's not revisit the past,” Arthur interrupted. “I'm trying to be forward facing.”

“What does that mean?” Gemma said. “I can't believe I married you. I'm being punished for my superficiality.”

“How can you be punished for something good?” Arthur asked. “But, the girls? I'd like to take them out for dinner.”

“And when are you leaving?”

“First thing,” Arthur said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, take them to dinner. One hour, and then I want them back.”

“I'm on my way.”

Arthur was preparing his pitch. He would tell Gemma to just come with him, to Nevada, mainly to have Pastor Roger
convince her to give their marriage another shot. Then she would return with Arthur to New York, or, even better, move with him to Dallas, where he could resume trading and being a job creator.

He pulled up in front of his mother-in-law's house and immediately saw her glaring at him from the front porch where she stood, banished by Gemma for smoking menthol cigarettes.

“He's back,” Doreen growled. “I assume you have a great investment opportunity for me.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. But that's not why I'm here. I'm here to take my kids out to dinner,” Arthur said.

“I know. I'm coming too,” Doreen said, smushing her cigarette out in a white ceramic ashtray.

“Daddy!” the girls shouted, running out the front door.

“Hey, cuties. Now, talk to Gam for a few minutes while I have a quick word with your mom.”

“She says she doesn't want to see you.”

“Shhhh, she's just being mysterious.”

“Ha!” Doreen said. “The only mystery is why she ever married you.”

The screen door made a quiet creak as he opened it. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the interior darkness. “Gem?”

He remembered the way through the living room, past the piano and into Gemma's old bedroom.

“Hello, baby doll,” he said.

Gemma was lying in bed, reading a magazine. “Look, it says here that you were in Dallas at the Freedom Prairie Church, and, oh look, Faith Hill was there too!”

“Gem, you need to come with me.”

“To dinner?”

“To meet with Pastor Roger. He said we should be together. That if we're together, there is nothing we can't achieve. You can
go back to being a great mom—not getting attacked by coyotes and stuff—and I can go back to what I'm good at.”

“And what is that, Arthur?”

“Entrepreneuring. We'll move to Dallas!”

“Dallas? Arthur, I'm never going anywhere with you. Do I really need to go through the list of fucked-up things you did? Starting with cheating our friends and ending with living with your fucking mistress, and, oh yes, didn't you also cheat
her
friends and family?”

“Cheat is not really the right word,” Arthur said. “I was misunderstood. I was building a small business and the socialists came and they regulated me because they hate entrepreneurs—”

“You don't really believe that, do you? Socialists? In America? There are families living in caves. And socialists are the problem? You know how much it cost to see the doctor after the attack?”

“The market, um, isn't always, um, sufficient?” Arthur said. “Efficient!” He was so pleased when he came up with the correct word that he smiled, as if expecting Gemma to get back together with him as a reward.

Gemma shook her head. He was still a handsome man, with his thick lips and new goatee. Even now, she found herself drawn to Arthur's physical charms, but the weight of repulsive behavior had tilted the scales permanently toward disgust.

“Arthur, I made a mistake marrying you. We have two wonderful girls and so we have to find a way to be civil, but we aren't getting back together. Now, when you go back to New York for your trial—”

“Pastor Roger says they are going to drop my case.”

“Of course they will,” Gemma said. “Well, after whatever happens happens, then we'll figure out how you can see the kids on alternate Sundays or something like that.”

“Alternate? You mean once a week?”

“No, Arthur, there's just one Sunday a week. But that's a discussion for later. Right now, see our girls—my mom is going to ride along and sit in the car while you dine. And have them back in an hour.”

“Doreen is coming?”

“I don't trust you, Arthur, so take it or leave it, that's how it's gonna be.”

HE DROVE THE GIRLS DOWN
to the Golden Bull, recently rebuilt after the Pacific had flooded lower Santa Monica Canyon. The restaurant bar was crowded with various grips and techs from
Whale Watch
unwinding after their shift. Doreen stayed in the car in the valet lot with a paperback novel and a pack of menthols to bide her time. They were given a booth in the front of the restaurant and each ordered a surf and turf—the hotter planet, warming oceans, and vast unregulated agro-fecal runoff from man's shores had made the seabeds grotesquely fecund with lobsters, which seemed to be living in a perpetual state of overabundance. There were lobsters on every menu, in every sandwich, as the basis of every stuffing and starchy crust. The rubbery meat was tasteless, but still, with buttery sauce, palatable enough. Franny and Ginny dunked their tail-meat into the butter and ate with grim faces, deciding to take this opportunity of alone time with Daddy to make their case that the current state of affairs—Daddy gone—was not acceptable to them.

“I know, I know,” said Arthur, sipping a margarita. “Tell your mom. Hey, I'm here, right? I want to get back together with Mom, but she won't have it.”

“That's because you committed securities fraud, among other charges.”

“Mom told you that?”

“Gam.”

“Well, there are other people, really cool smart people—do you know who Pastor Roger is?”

“He's on TV.”

“That's right. And he believes in Daddy. He says that what I did was really important. For the economy, for American energy independence.”

“Is that why you have to wear that bracelet on your ankle?” Ginny asked.

“What's energy independence?” Franny asked.

“Yes, well, no. I wear this so that people can keep track of me,” Arthur said. “Energy independence is when, when we drive our cars or fly in a big airplane, or we cook those lobsters, you need gas or oil or something, and we want to cook that stuff ourselves, not let the Arabs or Chinese cook it for us—”

“Or Mexicans—” Ginny said.

“Exactly, or Mexicans. Because Americans, we want to cook our own food.” Arthur wrinkled his brow. “Or, no, we don't want to do that. But we want to have our own fuel to cook our food.”

“Gam cooks our food. She made us a pot pie. Is that energy independence?”

Arthur sipped from his margarita. “Um, yeah, no, that's not really it, but sort of.”

“You're not making any sense,” Ginny said.

“But we still love you,” Franny added, with a rolling of her eyes toward Ginny.

Arthur tried to change the subject. “Ginny, how is the arm?”

“Itchy, sometimes.”

“Are you, like, freaked out about the coyotes?”

“I was, but Mom was awesome. You don't even know.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mom is so awesome. But what about Dad? Dad who got them their summer house and private school tuitions and a million ballet, ice skating, gymnastics, and God-knows-what classes? Sure, it had gone a little off the rails the last few months, but was that his fault? No, he had already established that.

He watched the girls chew their lobsters. They needed to be together again as a family. Pastor Roger was right. It was all about family, family and energy independence and entrepreneuring and job creating. If they could just be together again, then Arthur was sure they would have a bright future. He needed Gemma and the kids to see Pastor Roger, to meet with him. Then he would be able to make everything understandable in a way that made sense, even to Gemma.

THE GIRLS SHARED A QUEEN-SIZE
piled high with the same stuffed animals and quilts that had surrounded Gemma when she was a little girl, the old clean smell of the fraying cotton somehow as comforting to them as it had been to Gemma. The little room faced Adelaide, and the cliff beyond that, and when Gemma was a girl, before the oil rigs and the flooding of Santa Monica Canyon, the ocean, the curve of the shore past Jetty, up toward Sunset, the dusty tan and drab olive of the cliffs—relatively coyote-free—all of that had been her true north, the sight reassuring, particularly after her own handsome rascal of a father ran off with a German exchange student named Arnold when Gemma was just nine. What was it about their line of women, always falling for good-looking idiots?

Her own wounds were healing, the horror of the coyote attack still fresh in her mind, if less immediate. But still, she
had
fought off the dogs, hadn't she? She took some renewed confidence in
her ability to be a mother. If the dogs could not get her girls, then no one would, not that idiot Arthur, not this cruel, unfeeling world of men.

She lay down in bed, for the first time in months with a sense of possibility. Nothing would be easy. A woman, crowding forty, two kids, no degree, having to start over in a country where underclass and overclass were as divided as serfs and nobles, on a planet gone awash in melted arctic ice and broiling in 130-degree summers, where there was no collective idea about how to fix any of this, much less any acknowledgment that there was even a problem. She could not believe that finding sanctuary in some kind of postapocalyptic housing for the wealthy once seemed a plausible solution to her. Was that really the best they could do? A few thousand years of civilization was going to end with bankers and lawyers and movie stars and tech-company C-suiters living on islands while the rest of humanity parched or drowned? Yet that's what passed for forward thinking among her former friends in Manhattan. Of course, the sanctuaries were always described more as contingency plans, like fallout shelters during the 1950s, something you didn't want to use but it was reassuring to have, just in case. But there was no other course; this was exactly where they were heading.

She heard her phone buzz and saw a kik-tok from Richie.