The Subprimes (21 page)

Vegas has never recovered from the cyclical housing busts, and the whole strip itself has the sickly luster of a grandly renovated McMansion, now a decade out of fashion. The great slot boxes and shopping malls and fountains and fake Paris are all still standing and as gaudily lit and trying-to-beckon as ever, but the true high rollers have long ago forsworn Vegas to gamble instead in the deregulated casinos of Coney Island, on the East Coast, and Santa Monica, on the West Coast. Why fly across country when better action is a few miles away by helicopter?

But the old glitter and heat still excite, though the fountains of the Bellagio no longer spout and the pools at Caesars are empty, Vegas itself having exhausted the central Nevada aquafier a few years back. But for Jinx and Ronin, this skrim of unreality somehow reminds them of theme-park visits and boardwalk afternoons.

“Let's just camp here for the night,” I say.

Gemma is reluctant. She wants to continue her pursuit. But I point out that Pastor Roger isn't going anywhere. He's vowed to liberate Valence, and he's waiting to bless the newest Pepper Sisters creation, the 480-foot-high, 125-foot-long, 22,000-ton Joshua Extractor, essentially a deep-sea rig on sixteen-foot-wide treads that requires an additional six lanes of highway on every road it travels. The beast, now lumbering toward Valence, has been giddily featured on the
Today
show as America's latest and greatest weapon in the war for energy independence. A one-stop shale-oil extractor that reduces the number of employees on a
fracking site from forty-eight to a mere half-dozen who sit in a climate-controlled bridge high atop the vehicle.

“With the Joshua, all the foreman—that's what he's called, or is he a captain, like on a ship?—all he has to do is drive up and then drop the bit, flip a switch, and then start drilling,” the host marveled.

“It's that easy!”

“And then he can pump two hundred and forty thousand gallons of water a second into that hole.”

“That's a lot of water!”

WE TAKE A COUPLE OF
rooms at Caesars, one for me and the kids and the other for Gemma. My relationship with Gemma is either progressing at surprising speed—our third date and we're already in Vegas!—or is, in reality, a highly awkward courtship, unfolding, as it is, around both a kidnapping and an attempt to thwart a kidnapper. After I send the kids down to the buffet—“Lobster Served 21 Ways”—I head over to Gemma's, where she lets me in while holding a handset to her ear.

“The kids called my mom,” Gemma whispers to me.

“No, you don't need to come out here, Mom,” she says into the phone. “No, I'm with Richie . . . yes, and his kids . . . no, he's not a child molester . . . no, I haven't gone from an embezzler to a molester . . . yes, that would actually be going down in the world, I suppose, but that's literally the first nice thing you've ever said about Arthur, and you say it now? Good-bye, Mom.”

“That sounded like a real vote of confidence from her,” I say.

“Don't worry. She'll actually like you. She never could stand Arthur.”

She's taken a shower and is in a white terry-cloth robe. I walk over and stand by the windows, looking down at the abandoned
courtyard. The huge circular centerpiece pool, with a fountain in the middle—one of about a dozen spread inside Caesars' grounds—used to be full of muscular boys and curvy girls holding large brightly colored drinks shaped like bongs and old dudes swimming lazily between them. Now the pools are bone dry, save for one tiny lap pool about a half-mile away across the compound. They might as well frack here, I think.

“Have you heard from your wife?” Gemma asks.

“Ex-wife,” I say. “And, yeah, or, actually, I have received about fifty texts and kiks, but I'm not reading or listening.”

I cross the green carpeting, past a velvet upholstered club chair and a coffee table with the top about the size of a CD case. “I don't want to talk about our problems.”

“Without those, we are nothing,” Gemma says.

“Let's make tonight about us,” I say. “Oh, and my kids, who will be back upstairs in about twenty minutes. And I'm sure I'll be hearing from various attorneys who are involved in various legal actions in which I am a defendant very shortly. But besides that, and the fact that your felonious ex-husband has kidnapped your children—who are recovering from a bear attack, was it?—we should be able to free our minds and have totally uninhibited, empty-headed animal-like sex.”

I pull her toward me, taking her in my arms, the thick bathrobe making her seem more substantial than she is. She smells of shower steam and sweet soap, the scent coming off her cheeks and sticking in my nose so that whenever I inhale, there she is. Every kiss is with intent, I believe, the desire to push further, to climb into this person, to ravage her, to unload on her, and that is why even in my advancing years, it still causes an adolescent rush, an eruption of ego so that I can fool myself, tongue touching Gemma's tongue, hands inside her robe, on soft breasts, pinching nipples, eliciting moans, hands moving down the robe,
toward her uncovered mons, the soft scratch of her pubes, I can fool myself in these seconds, because of the thrill of our kiss, that I am somehow still this bitchin' awesome dude that I never was and certainly never will be again. Making out with a girl for the first, or second, or third time, it makes every rock-and-roll song dead-on accurate, every guitar chord of every rock anthem suddenly hits you square and reminds you how absolutely right Pete Townshend is on every verse, even after decades of crappy TV show sound tracks and car commercials. Because it cuts through—this feeling of being with a new girl—it cuts right through to slice open the closed universe and make everything possible again.

After, we are lying on the scratchy metallic green bed cover. For a few moments, as I pull Gemma close to me and she lies with her cheek against my shoulder, our fears and concerns are at bay. But they come rushing back—I can almost feel the instant a jolt through Gemma's body reconnects her worry circuits: her kids are still out there, somewhere, with her idiot criminal of a husband.

Where are my own children?

I pull on trousers, shirt, shoes, and head down the hall to the elevator and then downstairs, kikking Ronin as I go.

They've forsworn the buffet—the lines are still too long—and instead opted for the shorter line at Shake Shack. When I find them, they are at a table, finishing up their burgers. Ronin is on the phone. I join them, pull up a chair, pick up a leftover french fry.

“Who is he talking to?” I ask Jinx.

“Mom,” she says.

“No, oh no, don't tell her where we are,” I stage-whisper to Ronin.

“Too late,” Jinx says. “He already did.”

“You seem happy about that,” I say.

“I'm neutral. Between you and Mom? I have to be.”

I nod. “Yes, but you know”—I lower my voice so that Anya can't hear me—“but you know that your mom wants to take you to Indonesia. I'll never see you again.”

Ronin holds the phone out to me. “Mom wants to talk to you.”

I wave my hands. “No, no.”

But it's too late, he's put the phone to my ear. “Richie?”

“Hello, Anya.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Um, a road trip.”

“You are violating a court order.”

“That was a cheap shot. Behind my back?”

“It's the best thing for the kids to get away.”

“It's not going to happen.”

“Oh yes it is,” Anya says. “You are so going to regret this. I will find you and—”

“Don't threaten me,” I say. “I'm beyond that. I'm—”

“You're right. I'm not going to threaten you. But I will have my children.”

I disconnect and hand the phone back to Ronin. “What did you say?”

“I told her we were in Vegas,” Ronin says.

“Did you tell her which hotel?”

He shakes his head.

“Good boy. Okay, we need to get a little rest and then we're back on the road.”

THAT NIGHT, I'M ANXIOUS FOR
my kids to go to sleep so I can go back over and reconnect with Gemma. Jinx senses my impatience
and has chosen this evening to begin what she promises will be a life of meticulous flossing. She's carefully sliding the string alongside each tooth, and then rinsing each time.

“Jinx, you have to go to bed,” I say.

She ignores me, continuing to floss.

Finally she finishes, and then she starts brushing. She brushes with the same metronomic persistence as she has flossed, and this seems to take even longer.

“Jesus, Jinx, can you fucking hurry up?”

She rinses, puts down her toothbrush, and frowns at me. “Don't curse at me. And DON'T take the Lord's name.”

“Whatever, Jinx,” I say. “You know, you're turning into a bully about all this God stuff.”

“Well, you're rude and abusive.”

“Abusive?”

“You shouldn't use profanity with children. That's abusive.”

“It's just words, Jinx. Actions are what matter.”

“Pastor Roger says—”

“Jesus, will you shut up about Pastor Roger? He's a charlatan. A complete fraud. He's someone morons believe in.”

“Who are you to tell me what to believe?”

“I'm your father,” I tell her. “I can give you my opinion. Now go to bed.”

“No.”

“Will you go to bed?”

“No. You can't tell me what to do.”

“Look, Jinx, it's been a long day, you need some sleep. We all do.”

“I want to see Mommy,” she says, and a few tears pop from her eyes.

“You can't, not right now.”

She starts bawling.

I know what I should do is go and comfort her, but instead I become angrier. “Damnit, Jinx, you need to toughen up here. You can't be a baby now. Okay?”

“Noooo.”

“Toughen up!” I take her by the shoulders, not roughly, I don't think, but I want to focus her, to bring her back. At contact, she starts howling, as if I have injured her.

Ronin, who has been lying on a rollaway, listening to music, sits up and removes his headphones. “Dad? What are you doing?”

“I barely touched her,” I say.

Ronin runs over and takes Jinx in his arms. “Leave us alone!” Now he's shouting. “Why can't you be like a normal dad? Like everyone else? Why do you have to be such a freak?”

“I'm not, I wasn't doing—” I am on the defensive. “I'm sorry, I just lost my cool. It's this whole Pastor Roger thing. I know he's a big deal to Jinx, but I, well, I see him very differently. In fact, he's suing me.”

“And I hope he WINS!” Jinx says.

I'm an awful father. I acknowledge as much to my children, reciting a litany of my failings in a soothing and relaxing voice, intending to put them to sleep. There was the time I was caught smoking marijuana at a back-to-school night, the time I used profanities toward Jinx's second-grade teacher, the time I started an e-mail chain trying to get Jinx's elementary school principal fired, the time I got drunk and fell asleep in the front yard at the birthday party of one of Ronin's friends, the time Anya and I got into a fight during a parent-teacher conference and the teacher called security, the time the police came when I was teaching Ronin how to ride a bike because my neighbors thought they were watching an act of child abuse, the time I made Ronin play touch football on the street and the police gave me a summons.
There are so many times, and my children find it relaxing to hear me string together my apologies and confessions of guilt, as if they find it reassuring that all our problems, all our family's shortcomings, are the sins of the father.

And when I put it like that, I'm thinking, after both my children are finally asleep, their faces reflecting the desert-night Vegas-strip neon sheen streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, maybe I am a flop of a dad. Maybe Anya taking them away is truly for the best. I'm a mess, a middle-aged stoner who has been lucky making a living—until now, anyway—but a mess of a parent, a shitty role model, and have I conceived of a plan to escape the imminent end? Absolutely not.

I sneak over to Gemma's and for a few minutes again it's like a drug, this fondling and cuddling and intercourse with a beautiful new woman, and I am kept from my own fears and worries and we steal a few hours' real sleep before our fears resurface and we wake, dress, and flee.

I
T WAS 120 DEGREES ON
God's great Earth today, a sobering temperature, so scorching that three minutes under God's great sun would leave an exposed arm or forehead raw-steak red. That's why God created air-conditioning, of course, and to power those compressors, God made the juice, and to extract the juice God created fracking, and to frack the Earth God begat the Joshua Extractor. As Pastor Roger walked around the monstrous vehicle—the size of a six-story office building on half-tracks, ladders affixed to the sides that climbed up so high into the blinding sun that Pastor Roger could not see where they bowed in at the first platform. The Joshua's superstructure rested on a girded-steel glacis plate forty feet above ground level. Below the telescopic kelly, drill pipe, and casing was a red blowout protector, and hanging between the treads, like the glistening testicles of a Minotaur, was the massive oiled bit, a two-meter-wide toothed and barbed bulb that could cut through granite at a rate of eight feet per minute.

God's vision was great, Pastor Roger reflected, so he sent this shining steed of capitalism to help the Pepper Sisters extract the blessed juice. The pastor stood in the shade, listening to an engineer describe how the Joshua could roll over a shale oil field, drop the bit, wait a few days, release the derrick, casing, and traveling block, after which it was a simple matter of pumping and gathering. Then the Joshua could move on to the next site. The sight of the Joshua lumbering over the horizon, why, it had to be among the most inspiring of God's creations. It could block out the sun; its sound was like thunder and waves crashing, its power like that of an approaching tornado. The massive 46,000-horsepower, 14-cylinder diesel engine could shatter windows and rattle houses miles from its path.

How could this be wrong? How could God have created something this great and unleash it upon the earth if it were not his vision? This was a weapon in his divine hand.

An elevator rises through the middle of the beast, but Pastor Roger preferred to climb the outside, to feel for himself the immensity and grandeur.

But it was hot, the ladder's metal scorching to the touch. He spit once in each hand, asked God to help him deal with the pain, and started his ascent, up past the oily-smelling guts of the beast, up, up, up to the chapel in the sky from which the foreman could survey this earthly kingdom. He climbed and felt the hot wind carry him, lifting him up forty feet from the earth, to the first platform, where he stepped on the grooved steel and walked around a motor room to the elevator to continue the rise to the top.

The television crew—a cameraman and boom mic operator—waited for him on the bridge of the earth vessel along with its six crew members, who stood awkwardly, unsure of how to act before the cameras. Finally, the elevator door opened and Steven Shopper emerged.

“Good, good, now you all do whatever you would be doing if the pastor weren't here. He's going to offer his blessing, and we'll get some footage for the news.”

The elevator door opened again and Pastor Roger stepped out, clapped his hands once, and took a deep breath.

“Lovely, lovely”—he smiled at the crew—“great to see you!” And he pumped his fist.

In the distance, he could see the abandoned exurbs with their unfinished ranch houses, now inhabited by the godless progressives who respected neither private property nor God's laws. With the Joshua crew surrounding him, Pastor Roger blessed the Joshua Extractor, thanked the Pepper Sisters for their vision and the members of Freedom Prairie Church for their support, and thanked God for giving them this Earth and the tools to extract the juice upon which they all suckle.

God, we acknowledge that the Earth and all that is in

        
it belongs to you.

The Earth is the Lord's in all its fullness.

Who may ascent into the hill of the Lord?

Or who may stand in his holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,

Nor sworn deceitfully.

He urged the foreman and his crew aboard the Joshua Extractor to be bold and brave and fearless, to brush aide all who would stand in the way of God's will. He asked the crew to bow down before him, to feel the laying on of his hands. He wept as they looked at one another, the men unsure of the meaning of this prayer. All they had been told was that the pastor would be coming up to offer a blessing. Later, on the KIK News feed of
Pastor Roger blessing the Joshua, the men seemed bewildered as the pastor prayed for them.

FRANNY AND GINNY AWOKE A
few miles outside of L.A. and had been complaining every quarter mile since, angrily demanding an explanation of what was going on as regularly as the appearance of the oncoming traffic. Arthur had forgotten how noisy his children could be and for a few moments considered turning around and heading back to his mother-in-law's house to deposit them and good riddance. But he recalled that Pastor Roger would only support him if he could reconcile with his wife and children. Well, he was two-thirds of the way there. He just had to get his brood to Nevada, where Pastor Roger was bivouacked supervising some fight against communists or something, and then his wife would turn up and they would all sit down with Pastor Roger and he would sew them all back up into one happy family. Oh, it would never quite be the way it had been, living in New York, summering in the Hamptons, that had been quite a sweet ride, but living in some nice Dallas suburb, Parker or Highland Park, and perhaps managing some of Freedom Prairie's substantial assets, though even going to work for the Pepper Sisters would be a fine place to start his comeback. In time, the family could even return to New York. Isn't that what disgraced financiers did?

“Will you two just shut up?” he shouted for the twenty-fifth time since leaving L.A. County.

He had reneged on the waffles promise but now had no choice but to stop and feed the girls, who refused any number of fast-food options, citing their unhealthy ingredients and statistics on teen obesity. He finally found them organic turkey jerky and single-serving soy milk cartons in a gas-station convenience
annex. At least he couldn't be accused of actually starving his children.

“Mom is never going to take you back,” Franny told him. “She hates you.”

“We'll see about that,” Arthur said.

“She says you're a criminal,” Ginny said.

“Well, one person's criminal is another person's Sheriff of Nottingham,” Arthur said.

“You mean Robin Hood?”

“Right, Robin Hood.”

“So you stole from the rich and gave to the poor?” Ginny asked.

“Well, I stole from the rich AND the poor—NO, I didn't steal. I was making the economy more efficient, performing a function, until the government, the progressives, cracked down on me.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Because they hate success. They want everyone to be poor.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“Yes it does, now shut up.”

They drove through the hot desert. Arthur had to call Steven Shopper to arrange for temporary credit relief so he could pass the credit checks. Finally, the girls fell asleep again as they crossed into Nevada.

STEVEN SHOPPER STUDIED ARTHUR AND
his daughters, the grit and filth of five hundred miles of road staining them so that they looked practically subprime. This would not do. Arthur was happy to be issued fresh khakis and a clean button-up shirt, but the girls objected to the taffeta dresses, complaining the outfits
were too girly-girl, until leggings and skirts that appealed to them were produced.

“And your wife?” Shopper asked, after they stepped outside the trailer so the girls could change.

“Oh, she should be turning up at any minute.”

“Any minute?”

“She's coming separately.”

“What?”

“Well, she's going to follow. That's what I mean.”

“Follow you? Do you mean she's in pursuit?”

Arthur shrugged.

Shopper was concerned. “This isn't what Pastor Roger intended. For you to, um, abduct your children, if that's what you've done.”

“Come on,” Arthur said. “I had to do it. I mean, Ginny was attacked by a coyote. Whose fault is that? I'm trying to work with you.”

“The pastor has been generous with both his time and spirit. He's arranged for the removal of the monitoring anklet. And he has been more than fair in terms of easing your passage, but he won't have a home-wrecking philanderer in his flock.”

“She'll be here,” Arthur said.

Franny and Ginny were seated at a Formica table, eating dry, frosted cornflakes from bowls. The trailer they were in was like a bus, only without the driver's seat. Instead, there was a tinted window that looked out on several other trailers, and beyond them the Joshua Extractor, casting a shadow that left most of the trailers in the shade.

“This is cool, isn't it?” Arthur feigned enthusiasm. “Look at that, it's like the Statue of Liberty.”

“Not really,” both girls said.

There was a bathroom with a shower, and beyond that a bedroom with a queen-size bed. Arthur walked around the narrow
kitchen, opening cabinets, finding water bottles, crackers, potato chips, soap.

“Well, it beats being eaten by dogs,” Arthur said. “And that's what living with your momma led to.”

“Where are we?” asked Ginny.

“We're waiting for Pastor Roger—and for your mom,” Arthur explained.

“Aren't you going to jail?”

“Well, as I told you, probably not, because to some people, including Pastor Roger, I'm a hero. You should be proud of your daddy. What I did helped make this”—he pointed at the Joshua—“made this possible. Or sort of. Now, I'm going to take a quick nap, get rested for Pastor Roger. You two rest up here.”

Arthur walked to the back of the trailer and lay down on the hard foam. As he fell into a light, unrestful sleep, he thought about how close he was to rebuilding his life, to vindication.

FRANNY AND GINNY FOLLOWED THE
outline of the shadow of the Joshua, not feeling the full intensity of the scorching desert heat until they were out of its shadow and picking their way over the desert scrub. They passed the open doors of other trailers, where they saw cameramen and reporters in polo shirts, some with FP logos stitched on the chest. Next to some of the trailers were piles of refuse, empty cereal boxes and milk containers and potato chips mashed into silty sand. The girls passed through the wheeled city as if they were invisible, the Freedom Prairie officials and television reporters and cameramen too busy to notice them. When they reached the edge of the trailer camp they hesitated at the expanse of open desert before them. They followed their line of sight and could see a village of some kind, a strip of houses in the distance, nestled beneath small hills.

They stopped, shading their eyes from the sun. Then, as if having the same thought at the same moment, they set out, right feet first, into the crab-grassed desert, the heat of the ground pressing up through their thin-soled sneakers.

“It's snowing,” Franny said.

Ginny held her hand out. “This isn't snow.”

They studied the flakes accumulating on their hands, powdery silver-gray specks soon covering their palms, their arms, their hair.

The ash sprinkled down from the clear sky, trillions of particles, the carbon fallout of vast fires to the east, burning uncontrollably for months. A shift in wind brought the smoke system here, and the flakes were thickening till they partially blocked out the sun and exuded a sickly sweet charcoal smell that left their lungs aching when they inhaled too deeply.

“I don't like this,” Franny said.

“It's just ashes. It can't hurt us.”

The sooty blanket kept their bare arms from burning in the sun, but it also reduced visibility so the girls were quickly lost in the desert. They walked straight, leaning into the hot wind, their steps making impressions in the sulfurous ground that filled rapidly with falling ash.

“Do you think Mom will come?” Franny asked.

“Of course she'll come,” Ginny said. “You can count on Mom.”

“And Dad?”

“Dad? I don't know about Dad.”

“Is he a criminal?”

Ginny did not want to answer that one, so she continued walking, patting her dress and watching the gray, powdery residue go up in puffs.

THE BOY PERCHED AT THE
top of a hill, at the base of a runty barren tree, was gazing through their solitary pair of binoculars at the security techs, who were themselves gazing back. You're watching me? Well,
I'm
watching
you
, the boy thought. About him were a squad of fellow Gorillas—Emmett and Yuri and Vito—lying belly down on the earth, their desert-hue clothing, stained not by design but by boyhood habit, making them almost invisible against the ashy gray earth.

“We've got incoming,” said Tom, picking up two figures in white skirts crossing through the ash-fall.

“Hajis?” asked Emmett, loading a marble into a Wrist-Rocket.

The boy squinted through the lenses, struggling to discern the forms. “No, these are . . . girls.”

“Girl hajis?”

“No, they look like girl
girls
.”

There was disappointment among the Gorillas that the enemy incursion was not only a pair of females but also, probably, not even an incursion.

“Well, we have to do a full screen anyway,” said Emmett.

The squad crawled backward down the hill and around the ridge to a crag-protected spot from which they could see the enemy approaching.

“They're kids,” said Tom, “a couple of damn girls, just what we need.”

“Should we send them back?” Emmett asked.