The Subprimes (14 page)

“WHAT? LIKE WHAT? LIKE MY THING IS REAL?”

I hold my hands out, urging him to keep quiet. “No, it's not real. None of this is real.”

His upper lip and cheeks are smeared with tears and snot so that they shine in the streetlight glare.

He wipes his face with the sleeve of his hoodie. He shakes his head. “It'sjustthatIgotoFreaksandeverybodythinksI'mafreakandnowyoudothisanditwillallstartagainandthoseguyswilltelleverybodyandI'lljustbethatfreakpervertkidwiththefreakpervertdadlikewe'rethepervfamilywholikejustgrabsandmolestseverybody.”

“Ronin,” I say, “you did not do anything wrong. Well, okay, maybe you did, by pinching that girl, but that was, like, a small mistake, and you learned. And I did not do anything wrong. We stopped to play football, and that's fine. That's just an okay thing to do.” I take him by the shoulders. “And you're okay, Rone, you're okay. This is all . . . It's all bullshit.”

“I'LL PRAY FOR YOU, DAD,”
Jinx is telling me. “I'll ask the Lord's forgiveness for your sins.”

“No, Jinx,” I say. “I don't need you to pray for me. I didn't do anything wrong.”

“‘Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger,'” says Jinx. “The Bible says to bring them up in discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Our daughter, Jinx, has always been less worrisome than her older brother. Forceful and self-motivated, as well as a pain in the ass, she enjoys long and complicated conversations, which she pursues with Talmudic persistence and a lawyerly appreciation for precedents. She brings up conversations from months prior in an argument about a Halloween costume or whether or not she can have a sleepover, reminding my ex-wife, for example, that she told Jinx she would always support her creative projects and therefore Anya should satisfy her demand to construct a giant mustache out of foam and wire for her.

Jinx usually focused her attentions on making life miserable for her fellow fourth-graders and, periodically, her older brother. But her latest incarnation, as devout Christian, had caught all of us by surprise.

Over a period of ten days, Jinx had turned into a Bible-thumping ten-year-old Baptist after joining an after-school program at the local outpost of Pastor Roger's Freedom Prairie Church called the Captain's Club. Jinx was eager for the high-fructose-corn-syrup candies that CC gave out to students who memorized Bible verses. (Anya forbade anything in her house that had corn syrup, which ruled out virtually every recognizable consumer brand.) Jinx, whose memory has always been elephantine, was picking up four Bible verses a day, spitting them out at the end of CC, and returning home with a sack full of Warheads and Sour Patch Kids. There were other activities at CC, she told us: they could run in the yard—no unsupervised sports, of course—play religious board games, do their homework. But it was the Bible studies that Jinx enjoyed.

“Jinx, please, don't hit me with Bible verses now,” I say. “We
stopped and played football with some kids. Football, okay? I'm sure Pastor Roger loves football.”

Jinx is unsure of Pastor Roger's views on football and returns to eating her mashed potatoes and breaded chicken. Anya is seated at the table opposite me, her purse in front of her, waiting for the kids to finish dinner so she can take them back to her place for the night. She is also unsure about what exactly I have done wrong but has evidently decided to also come down on me for it.

“The police can't just arrest you for playing soccer,” she says.

“Not soccer,” I correct her. “Football.”

“But they can't arrest you—”

“They didn't arrest us, they gave me a summons,” I say. “I have to appear in court. Pay a fine.”

“But even in this country, they can't do that, not just for playing football. You must have done something.”

“THEY DID IT BECAUSE THEY THINK DAD'S A PERV. SOMEONE CALLED UP AND SAID THERE WAS THIS OLD PERV PLAYING WITH KIDS,” Ronin shouts.

“What's a perv?” Jinx asks.

“You were playing with children?” Anya asks.

“It's a person who touches other people inappropriately,” I tell Jinx.

“Like a molester?” Jinx asks.

“Yes.”

“Pastor Roger says child molesters are homosexuals. Because they commit unspeakable acts with others of their same gender, they know no boundaries when it comes to relations,” Jinx says and attempts to cut her chicken.

“That's . . . that's ridiculous, Jinx. Child molesters can be all types, gay, straight, anyone. Everyone can be crappy.” I reach over, take her knife, and slice for her.

“Like you, Dad,” Jinx says.

“I may be crappy, but don't lump me in with the child molesters.”

Ronin is surveying the table. I can see how from his perspective our family may have found a new level of embarrassing weirdness.

I turn to Anya. “This was a simple game. We stopped to play a game with some kids. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It was fun, Rone, you have to admit.”

He nods.

“It was a game of football. We were tackling each other. It's something we used to do as kids all the time. So when I saw the kids playing, I thought, why not?”

Anya is studying my expression. I can see she is wondering if I am stoned but is reluctant to ask in front of the children.

“This doesn't happen to normal people,” she says.

“Normal people?” I point around the table. “That doesn't apply.”

Anya excuses herself and says she will wait in the living room.

Ronin, who has somehow built up enough appetite for a second dinner just a few hours after his after-school Chinese food snack, sits, chews, and nods. I don't have much appetite, but I sit with Ronin and Jinx until they retreat to their rooms to gather their backpacks.

Anya is in the living room, playing solitaire on her phone.

“This isn't my fault,” I tell her.

She keeps moving digital cards on her screen with her thumb.

“I didn't do anything wrong.”

She puts down her phone. “You were stoned on marijuana.”

“So?”

“So that's why you make strange decisions. Like to play football with children. To tackle them. Nobody else, no other fathers,
do things like that. You know? That's why Ronin is the way he is. Confused. Having to go to this sex class. Because you are so messed up and you don't have any boundaries and you—”

“You're blaming me for Ronin? There's nothing wrong with the kid. You yourself said that the school is overreacting. Rone needs to play football, to tackle, to hit someone.”

“You were high. That's why you decided to play. You want to be some kind of bullshit hip dad. Like with your ripped T-shirts and jeans and sneakers. Your hair, the way you walk around. And telling Ronin everything is okay, that it is okay to be crap at school. To fail things. And you are always stoned, typical hip dad shit. I never should have agreed to joint custody.”

“Don't reopen old bullshit. Smoking had nothing to do with this,” I say.

“Of course it did. It's never your fault. You can't take any blame.”

“BUT THIS ISN'T MY FAULT.”

“See, now you are shouting.”

“OH, FUCK YOU,” I say and storm out. “I'm sure Florian is a much better father figure.”

Florian is Anya's boyfriend.

“Maybe he is,” I hear her say quietly.

Jinx is kneeling in her bedroom. I can see her lips moving. I am sure she is praying for us. But when I get closer, I hear her ask the Lord to save the whales on the TV show.

Anya rounds up the kids and they depart, both a blessing and a curse as I immediately miss them and cannot stand staying in the house all alone.

I go out to the Prius—that relic of the hybrid era—and start it up and drive down to my office. I park behind the Chinese restaurant and go upstairs. When I open my computer I see a kik-tok from Gemma Mack.

how are you doing? Boy were you right about the coyotes.

And I'm sorry I maced you. But you took me by surprise. . . .

I'm in santa monica with kids visiting family.

 

we should meet in person to discuss.

T
HEY BURIED HER IN A
dandelion patch at the bottom of the first foothill at the western edge of the subdivision, a shadeless spot, but pretty enough. In the early morning of the day after Soo passed, Valence gathered for its first funeral, the death of an old Korean lady who had turned up two days before, already in the late stages of terminal cancer. The men dug the hole six feet deep to keep coyotes off the smell, and lowered Soo in an old sleeping bag with photographs of her daughter and granddaughters as well as her own parents. They arranged her on her back, her eyes closed, and with a bouquet of yellow sunflowers atop her chest. Sargam brought Don, her widower, out to pay his last respects before the men had to leave for work and the kids were run down to the school Sargam had opened.

Vanessa watched the service from up the hill, seated in the
dirt, and in particular she noticed one young man, Atticus, whom she had first seen at the campfire the night her family drove in and whose teeth-showing grin she found appealing. He had a short forehead and round eyes, an almost effeminate nose, and shapely lips chapped from too much sun. He was deeply tanned, as were they all, and it suited him, went with his dirty-blond hair.

She made sure to walk past him several times at the campfire, to get water from the jug, to get a second helping of beans and rice from the table, and she noticed him noticing her. How long had it been since she felt the excitement of realizing a boy liked her? It had been months, ever since leaving home. (She still thought of Riverside as that, though she knew she would never be going back.) As she watched Atticus help dig the hole and then lower the old Korean lady into her grave, all Vanessa could think about were Atticus's muscles and the way his jeans rode low on his hips. As the mourners were readying to leave, Vanessa came down from her perch to where Atticus was walking with a shovel over his shoulder. She stepped in beside him, as if by coincidence.

“Oh, hey there,” Atticus said.

“Oh, hi.” She smiled and kept walking.

“Terrible about that old lady,” Atticus said.

“She was next door to us,” Vanessa said. “You should have heard her carrying on.”

Atticus shook his head. “Must have been something. Feel bad for him.” He gestured generally toward where Don had been during the brief service.

“Are you going to work up at the sites?”

Atticus smiled. “I am. I convinced them. I told them I'm strong enough and old enough. I'm eighteen.”

“Are not,” Vanessa said.

“Okay, but I'm sixteen, and I can swing a shovel better than most of these older guys. And you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Are not,” Atticus said.

“I'm fifteen, and if I could I would go up there with you. Anything to get out of here.”

“Aw, it's not so bad. Better than being on the streets in L.A. Where you from?”

“Near L.A. Riverside.”

“Nine-oh-niner, huh? Tweakerville. I lived in Malibu.”

“Did not.”

“I did, for a while, when I was a kid. It was called Malibu Lake, about an hour from Malibu. Was more like the valley. We lost that place and then moved to an apartment downtown.”

“What happened to your dad?” Vanessa asked.

“Barely knew him. Last I heard he was in Colorado, I think, and I heard he had a new family. I don't want to know him if he doesn't want to know me.” Atticus had to stop himself from running down his father any more.

“Well, I'm bored. We've only been here a couple weeks, but I've never even left Valence.”

“It's all right here. We have the dances.”

“All right for you. You're going to work. You can stop at a store and buy a, I don't know, Slurpee or something.”

They were almost to Vanessa's house, and she could see her mom standing in the driveway, probably looking for her.

“My little brother, he can run around with his friends. They're out playing all day.”

“And you're too grown-up for playing?”

“That kind of playing.” Vanessa smiled.

“How about after I come back from the sites, we hang out?” Atticus said.

Vanessa shrugged. “This is where I live, for now.”

She walked up the driveway to where Bailey stood regarding Atticus with a smile that did not hide her suspicion.

“New friend?” Bailey asked.

THE FIRST THINGS JEB NOTICED
every morning as they drove to the fracking site were the vast lakes of untreated waste water that had settled around the raised berms protecting the site, shimmery silver pools that bled to the horizon like a mirage. They didn't have to be told the water was salty and poisonous; the lakes gave off the smell of methane and car exhaust that made the possibility of life seem about as likely as a goldfish surviving in a gas tank. After a few days on the site, Jeb realized that what they were doing was pumping water into the earth, poisoning it, and then dumping it on the surface.

They motored up the circular dirt driveway over the berm and down to the site, where sixty men worked every day. Jeb and his crew had built that berm, with shovels and backhoes, and now the waste water was almost as high as the top, which meant they would have to build the flood wall even higher.

Jeb had never seen this many big-rig trucks parked so close together. He counted sixty-four rigs, slotted in bed-to-bed, their trailer-mounted pumps emitting a deep rumbling sound as they shot the high-pressure boron, zirconium, and titanium fracking fluid down the mile-and-a-half well. They were pumping down 50,000 liters of the water-based fluid a day, splitting open the shale and earth to allow the precious oil to escape through the fissures. The shale oil was pumped back up to the surface with water and then separated from the water in a fracturing tank
before it was stored in yet more truck-bed holding tanks. The waste water was pumped through the berm to the waste pools. Whatever had once lived out in that scrub land was gone or dead. In fact, Jeb was sure there weren't any animals besides humans living for a few miles in any direction.

HG Extraction operated the site, which was leased from the town of Placer, a highway rest-stop town that in its prime had been home to twenty-six residents but was now down to zero. The lease paid the former residents of Placer $650 a month each, and they took that money and ran when the first semis hauling the drilling towers rolled up. There were six full-time employees of HG Extraction on the site, and the rest of the workers were subcontracted day laborers from who knew where. Their beat-up SUVs kept showing up every day, and as long as the men could drive trucks and swing shovels and haul trash and operate a sump pump and they didn't complain if there weren't enough hazardous-material masks or that the antitoxin showers that had been promised were never installed, the managers asked no questions. These men seemed happy enough for the six-dollar-an-hour work, and when one of them complained, the managers would tell him there were a hundred men who would take his place.

Jeb started by working with a crew to extend the berm, shoveling black graphite pellets into nylon sacks and then hauling those up to the lip. The graphite pellets were trucked in three times a day and dumped from huge spigots of tanker trucks, the pellets piling up in a massive black mound. They stacked the graphite bags, hundreds of them barely raising the berm. But the waste-water level kept rising every day, the more oil they pumped out, and no matter how hard they worked, they could barely keep pace with the rising waters. Behind him was $40 million worth of HG equipment, and the only thing keeping the
flood of waste water from it were two dozen men from Valence hauling bags of pellets in the hot sun.

It was a long, brutal day of unrelenting lifting and tugging, as the men struggled to keep ahead of the pumps. Sixty-four 10,000-psi hydraulic pumps can shoot a whole lot of water down that borehole; twenty-four men had to work double-time just to have a chance at keeping up. By the time Jeb came down the berm for a half-hour lunch, he was aching and sore, his shoulder muscles twitching from the exertion. HG brought in its own food truck; Jeb stared at the cold rice and beans and tortillas he had brought before joining the rest of the men buying burgers and french fries and sodas, feeling guilty about spending $8 on food, but he was hungry from the work and knew he had a whole afternoon to get through. He ate with hands filthy and black from the rubbery pellets and dirt.

The afternoon sun bore down on them, the heat like an actual weight that seemed to be pressing on them so that their shoulders slumped and their knees buckled and their ankles became wobbly. When Jeb drank a liter of water, he knew he would sweat it out in fifteen minutes. The punishing sun seemed suspended in the western sky, never closing in on quitting time and heating them and everything it touched, so that by midafternoon the heat was coming up off the ground as well as down from the sky, and the head of a shovel left out for a short while would burn at the touch.

Finally, a voice shouted, “Time,” and the men set down their last sandbag and stumbled down the hill.

“Six an hour? I made more than that inside the Vernon walls,” Jeb said to the manager when he was counting his cash after the first day.

“Then why don't you go back there, if you had it so good?” said the manager.

Jeb nodded and kept walking back to his Flex. “By the time we pay for gas, lunch, we're bringing back maybe twenty dollars a day. That's hardly enough to feed a family.”

“It's steady,” said another man from Valence. “And he's right. There's plenty who'd take our place.”

THAT EVENING, VANESSA WAITED FOR
Atticus, and then they sat together, beneath a camphor tree, the air cool but the ground still retaining heat.

He had washed after his day's work, and she wore her one clean dress. Despite their eagerness to see each other, when they were alone they were both tongue-tied. Atticus asked if Vanessa had known the Korean lady they had put in the ground that morning.

She told him Soo and her husband, Don, had driven up to the house next door to theirs one afternoon, the lady already near death. She'd been diagnosed with first-stage lymphoma and used up all her health-care vouchers without ever getting cured. When they lost their home, rather than impose on their daughter, who herself had three kids and was barely getting by, they hit the road, figuring eventually to make it back to their daughter's, but Soo had deteriorated fast.

“She looked old,” Vanessa said. “And if an Asian lady looks old, then you know she's in bad shape.”

They had been run out of Vegas and turned up in Valence, desperate, and Sargam told them to stay, and called for Dr. Alfredo while Vanessa and her mom comforted the old lady and her husband. They were Presbyterians; lapsed, Don had said, but he found the words for a few prayers. Alfredo turned up, examined her quickly, and whispered to Sargam that there was nothing they could do for her. She had lumps everywhere, she
was coughing blood. He had a few Opanas that they had taken from some tweakers they had run off, and he gave her those, but she couldn't even get down a sip of water to swallow the pills.

“I never saw a person in so much pain,” Vanessa said.

After the sun had set and everything cooled down, Sargam told Bailey and Vanessa they could go home, that she would stay with Don and Soo. But Vanessa secretly sneaked back to watch through the back window. She had never seen anyone die before, not right in front of her, and she was curious.

Vanessa watched as Sargam lay down with the old lady, held her like she was spooning a lover and trying to comfort her. Don was distraught, leaning back against the wall, crying, mumbling in Korean. The old lady was shouting her daughter's name, Eleanor, Eleanor.

“Then this weird thing happened,” Vanessa said.

“What?” Atticus asked.

Vanessa said that she saw Sargam lay her hands over Soo's face, her fingers to the old lady's forehead, caressing her hair. It was as if she were soothing the old lady, calming her.

“Sargam's face went, like, all blank, like her eyes sort of, I don't know, rolled into her head? Sort of zombie-like?” Vanessa said.

But whatever she was doing, she seemed to be making the old lady feel better, was alleviating the awful pain she had felt before.

“She was, like, curing the lady?” Atticus asked.

Vanessa shook her head. “No, because we know what happened to her. But, I swear, it was like, this touch she had.”

Soo murmured throughout the night, and she seemed to fall asleep, Don also drifting into sleep as well. Sargam watched Soo take her last breath, letting Soo's husband sleep until first light.

“That's creepy,” Atticus said.

Vanessa shrugged. She couldn't explain what she had seen.

Atticus laughed and finally summoned the courage to take
Vanessa's hand, and then, emboldened by her squeezing his hand back, he leaned over and kissed her, lips grazing lips, warm soft flesh meeting in the cooling evening.

GEMMA HAS AGREED TO MEET
me at the Little Red Bar, the Chinese restaurant and bar downstairs from my office. I change into a clean shirt and check my hair in the mirror in my office bathroom before I go.

I arrive before her and park myself at one of the tables near the bar. There is a flat-panel television tuned to sports, but one of the patrons at the bar asks that it be turned to news so he can see about the whales that washed up on the beach. Gray whales have been washing up on the beach in Santa Monica over the last few days. Their migratory pattern was right off the coast and was disrupted, or so an oceanographer is insisting, by the drilling and extraction platforms now lining the coastline.

Already there was furious bidding under way for the media rights to the whales. The state wants to make a deal, but there is the wrinkle of the Santa Monica Bay Beach Club, which has leased the sand on which much of the show would have to be shot. It seems everyone is enthusiastic about the potential of another
Whale Watch
show, now that the East Hampton whales were all dead. A media expert said that if a dozen whales beached themselves, as happened on the East Coast, a network might pay $20 million for the show.