Under the Bridge (6 page)

Nevada was grounded, so Josephine drove down the street to see if Colin Jones was home.

She thought of Kelly some more, wishing she could see her and go for a drive in the new car. She and Kelly had always been best friends, ever since they were both eleven. When she'd been living in those stupid homes far away from View Royal, she'd kept Kelly's picture on her wall. She hadn't written her letters. That would have been too much. But she'd missed Kelly, and she realized as she drove that Kelly was her “loyalest” friend.
She's like a sister to me,
she thought.

Some girls would be jealous of Josephine Bell, but not Kelly. Some girls would think Josephine Bell was a slut just because she was gorgeous. (“That always pissed me off when girls would say, ‘Maybe she's a slut,' just because some girl is pretty. I'm not a slut. I'm not at all.”)

Kelly wasn't like that,
Josephine thought to herself. Kelly never got jealous of anybody.

•   •   •

Ping. Ping. She was back, the twisted little troublemaker. Colin Jones looked out on the street and saw Josephine leaning imperially against a shiny white car. He went outside and stared at the white Neon, brand new, with smooth white doors and a curved roof and windows without streaks of rain.

“Nice car,” he said, feeling a slight longing for the immaculate vehicle.

“I've got it for a few days,” she said, staring him right in the eyes.

He nodded. He was on to her.

After he'd ditched her, she'd started hanging out with Donovan and Khalil, two brothers who lived over by View Royal Video. Their mother was away a lot and so they had basement parties. Donovan and Khalil were minor celebrities in View Royal, and in the neighboring towns of Langford and Esquimalt. For one thing, they were both black, and therefore of the highest and most elite pedigree. To be black in Victoria was to be infused with an aura of indescribable glamor. It meant, regardless of your real personality, that you were just like, you had to be, must be, just like the glamorous and dangerous black men on TV. Tupac and Biggie and Too $hort and Ice Cube, and those black men from America who had guns and big cars and mansions and champagne and diamonds and Jeeps and low-riders and their own clothing lines and names of secret solidarity like Ruff Ryders and Eastsiders and big cars and mansions and champagne and ghettoes and pit bulls and sexy women in stilettos and anthems like, “Fuck with me, you fucking die, motherfucker.”

Donovan and Khalil, Colin thought, probably taught Josephine how to steal her new car. They did it with hairdressers' scissors, sticking the long shears into the lock and then into the ignition.

“I have it for a few days,” Josephine said, and she lit a cigarette, ran her hand through her blonde hair, and she seemed to him to be waiting for an invitation or a compliment.

He went inside his house and called 911.

“There's a car on 14 Marton Place,” he said to the dispatcher. “A
white Neon. I'm not going to say who. I'm not going to say how. But it's stolen and you might want to come and get it.”

But by the time the police arrived, Josephine was gone. It would not be the last time she would know when to leave, know how to avoid the cops. But not knowing of her future misdeeds, Colin Jones found himself both admiring and greatly irritated by her smooth escape.

Later, on the phone, Josephine and Kelly discussed the stolen car.

Kelly promised her, “If you get caught, I'll take some of the blame. If the cops come and take you in, just tell them I stole the car.”

“Kel, I would never do that!”

“But you could.”

And Josephine thought:
yes, I could, because Kelly is a true friend, like a sister, and Kelly,
she thought,
Kelly would do
anything
for me.

O
NCE THERE WAS
a woman named Dinah who had six daughters: Diamond, Donna, Deanna, Dahlia, and Destiny. Dusty was the youngest daughter, a girl in View Royal, who was, she would later say, “totally out of control.”

Dinah, her mother, was first to kick her out. (“Dusty's trouble. I couldn't handle her.”) For a few difficult months, she'd lived with Destiny, but then Destiny kicked her out. So she went to Kiwanis. Then she got in some trouble, and so Kiwanis kicked her out, and in the fall, she went to live in Alberta with her oldest sister, Dahlia.

Destiny warned Dahlia, “Dusty will cause nothing but trouble.” Yet Dahlia believed she could be the one to help Dusty. “I love my little sister. She has a good heart.”

•   •   •

Dusty moved like a boxer, with a kind of gait both ungainly and purposeful. She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her lips and eyes were broad and brash. Dusty's most unusual, and unnerving, feature was her voice, which contrasted so greatly with her physique. Her voice was full of melody and quite charming, and if you heard her speak, you would think, as Dahlia insisted, that Dusty had “a good heart.”

Dusty had met a boy just before she left Victoria. The boy's name was Jack Batley. She wrote it five hundred times on the piece of paper her probation officer had handed her. (“Change is possible. Change is up to YOU!”) Jack might have been described by others in View Royal as “rat-faced,” but Dusty liked his rough eyes, and she liked the way he looked in his black and white Adidas jacket.

Perhaps her separation from Jack was the reason Dusty made such a
disastrous au pair. Dahlia had several young children, and a full-time job as a truck driver, so when she invited Dusty to live with her, the invitation was not wholly one of charity. When Dahlia went away on her four-day drives to Yellowknife, Dusty would be in charge of babysitting, cooking meals, cleaning the house, picking the kids up from school, and putting the children to bed.

Yet Dusty played music very loud and slept in and once wrote “Niggers rule” on the wall with strawberry jam.

“Living with Dusty was a living hell,” Dahlia's daughter would later recall. “She would make crank phone calls telling people to lick her cunt and threatening to kill them.”

While in Alberta, Dusty received some very distressing news. Jack Batley had a new girlfriend, and the new girlfriend was Reena Virk.

“It's true. I saw her wearing his jacket,” Dusty was told.

“His Adidas jacket!”

Dusty flung herself across the carpeted floor and then thought of Reena. Reena!

The little kids were on the couch watching
Saved by the Bell.
Dusty picked up the phone and called a number in Victoria. In her sweet voice, she threatened. “The Crips are coming to your house to cap your ass!”

She then asked a boy on the couch, a boy of twelve, a friend of her niece, to help her. After Dusty gave orders to the young boy, she dialed the number and handed the phone to him.

“I'm coming down there tonight to KILL YOU!” the boy said, though his voice was not deep or menacing, and he was far away from View Royal and only twelve years old.

•   •   •

Dusty became reckless in her days as an au pair, and she wondered if she would ever see Josephine again. She knew that Josephine, like her, was shuttled about to homes all over the place. She wanted so to tell Josephine of Reena's betrayal. Josephine would understand, for when they were all together at Kiwanis, Josephine was always saying that Reena was the jealous type and Reena was jealous of her beauty.

The way he'd strolled around the trail by the Tillicum Mall. … His arm around her. … His name, Jack, just like the boy in
Titanic
who had
no money and was a noble thief and died for the love of the girl named Rose. …

Dusty crashed her sister's car into the curb. Dahlia was evicted, for the landlord did not appreciate the loud music or the “Niggers rule” graffiti. “Dusty was totally destroying my life,” Dahlia later said to police. “But I just couldn't send her back to View Royal. I kept threatening to, but I didn't have the heart to do it. I thought she just needed a little direction. I didn't want to give up on her like everyone else did. I gave her chance after chance. I bought Dusty clothes, makeup, jackets, shoes, smokes, whatever she needed.”

But then one day her son took her aside and said, “Mommy, Dusty swears at me! She's mean. Please don't go back to work. I hate her!”

And her daughter said, “If Dusty stays here any longer, I'm going to run away.”

Rather than sending Dusty away, Dahlia arranged for her friend Marlene, also a single mother, to move in and replace Dusty as babysitter.

Marlene told her, “Dusty is a very dangerous young lady.”

On the seventh day of October, while Dahlia was on her Yellowknife run, Dusty held a steak knife to her niece's throat and threatened to kill her. Dusty denied this was true, and yet her niece's friend told police, “Dusty held the knife above her shoulders and was about a foot away from Brianna's neck. She said, ‘Brianna, if you don't shut up right now, I'll stab you in the throat!'”

“That's when I started to get scared for my babies' lives,” Dahlia recalls. “I kept thinking, ‘She could really hurt someone.' The police did not charge Dusty. But Dahlia still called Social Services and told them to take Dusty out of her house. “I said if they didn't, I'd kick her out and she'd be living on the streets.”

Despite the violent misdeed, Dahlia still loved her sister and showed her no anger. (“We all grew up angry and it has to stop somewhere.”) She believed Dusty might still be redeemed. “She's a really good girl, but she has a bad temper and she needs a lot of help. My mother is a big part of all Dusty's problems. I think a big part of Dusty's problems are because she doesn't know who her father is and my mom doesn't know either. And that hurts Dusty in a big way.” Then, as if her police report might be read by some benevolent and omnipotent force, Dahlia closed with a plea: “Dusty has had a life of no love and no caring. Someone has to help her. She's a hurt little girl even though she is fifteen years old.”

She felt a sudden unease when Social Services came to take her little sister away.

“I knew she was going to get in trouble when she got back to Victoria,” she recalls. “She thought she was all alone in the big world. I told Dusty to grow a brain and then she could come back to live with me.”

G
RACE
F
OX
was a nice lady, Warren thought, for she took him into her house and treated him like a son. Her true son, Chris, was a pretty good friend of Warren from Shoreline. Warren's father arranged to send Grace some money, to pay for food and clothes, that kind of thing, and there was some discussion about the “rules of the home.”

Grace and her son, Chris, and now Warren as well, lived in a housing complex known as Christie Point. The homes were divided into four sections, named Elm, Pine, Spruce, and Oak. They resembled motels, two-story buildings with flat roofs and rows of identical doors, and yet Christie Point was built on the banks of the Gorge in the midst of a federal bird sanctuary.

The way to Warren's new home was paved with blue tar and pebbles, and wild geese with elaborate plumage darted by. White swans floated in the Gorge.

In the house, there was a black leather couch and a large-screen TV and a coffee table. There was a bedroom where Warren slept in the bed that had once belonged to Chris's older brother, Joel, who was now eighteen and living in Vancouver. For the first time since he was six years old, Warren slept on a bed instead of a couch, and he went out of his way to be polite and gracious around Chris's mom. Grace adored him; she felt as if she was doing what every woman and girl wanted to do when they looked at Warren: save him.

Warren bought a navy blue baseball cap for fifteen dollars at the Tillicum Mall, and at Quik-Press he paid a few dollars more to have the logo CMC applied. Grace sewed his name on the back of his baseball cap. She used white thread and stitched
Warren G.
Grace knew this was his nickname, but she did not know, as most kids in suburbs across North America knew, that Warren G. was Snoop Dogg's cousin and a Crip and from the LBC—Long Beach, Compton. Warren G., like Warren G., had a rep for being a sweet-faced ladies' man. Grace teased him—that's
how he learned of the phrase. “You're a ladies' man, aren't you?” and Warren answered, “I guess so. The girls all call me Little Romeo.”

Though the Fox household was humble, their view was a beautiful and desired one. From his bedroom, Warren could see the glimmering waters of the Gorge. Across the way were the rich folks who paid millions for the view. He felt lucky having the view, the sense of living near the calm waters, near the thin and elegant arbutus and cedar trees that lingered over the water's edge. He and Chris could sit on the porch at the back of the house, next to their crazy neighbor who had all this junk—plastic parrots and those stupid little elves and geraniums and a rusted old barbecue—and they wouldn't even notice the junk because they'd be kicking back looking at the miles and miles of shining water and the fancy homes across the beautiful divide.

Soon he knew everyone in Christie Point. He knew all the kids who lived there, and they told him the summers at Christie Point were awesome. They'd all hang out at the swimming pool, which was right behind the homes in the Spruce complex. Barbecues and skinny-dipping, a boy named D.J. told him. Summer rules!

He still called his mother, and she'd say, “Baby, my baby, I miss you. When are you coming home?” He felt guilty, and he promised her he'd come visit, and he did not tell her that he loved Grace like a mother.

Another good thing about Christie Point was that when you reached the end of the road, walking away from the Gorge, you were quite literally at Shoreline School. So, he and Chris could sleep in until 7:57, then grab their baseball caps and throw on some clothes and go running down the lane, past the ducks and the geese, and they'd be in homeroom right before the bell went off. Warren loved Shoreline. He didn't so much like the academics or even the athletics, but he liked peer counseling and Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith was the guidance counselor—just this big, cuddly woman, and she treated him like a son. Once he was telling her about something that happened with his mom, and Mrs. Smith started crying. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Aren't I supposed to be the one who's crying?” The thing was, he never really did cry. Not even when his dad left to go to California. Life was life. You made the best of it. Every night he thanked God for Syreeta.