The Subprimes (2 page)

The roar of traffic followed a predictable pattern, from constant to heavy to regular to sporadic. She could become accustomed to the cars and fumes, but the way the overpass blocked the stars was confusing to her. If she opened her eyes in the night, she was bewildered by the black above her until the ambient light from distant streetlights and passing cars would let her reestablish her sense of place.

Sargam was lying awake when she heard a murmuring, a shuffling of feet, the pepper-mill percussion of boots on gravel. She sat up and looked down the hill, where she could see a line of
uniformed men making their way through the gap in the fence. She crouched and ran over to where Bailey was sleeping, shaking her.

“Girl, get up.”

“What?”

“Trouble,” Sargam said, and then went back to her sleeping bag, which she began quickly rolling, stuffing it into her backpack.

Harsh white lights were now turned on, the beams cutting through the dark in whirling columns of motes. The men were marching up the hill, kicking awake the sleeping men and women. “Get up, subprimes! This is private property.”

“Dirty bums got to go!”

The young girl near Sargam screamed as a boot made contact with her stomach.

Jeb leaped up from where he had been rolling up his pack and knocked down the man who had kicked his daughter. The security guard was reaching for his holstered sidearm when with surprising quickness, Sargam jumped over the prone, terrified children still in their sleeping bags and brought her pry-bar down onto the back of the security guard's head. He went limp immediately, his arm falling from his holster.

Jeb rolled away, stood up.

“You run, girl,” Jeb said.

“Is he dead?” Sargam whispered.

“We're not waiting to find out.”

Everyone in Ryanville was grabbing possessions and scrambling down the hill toward the gap in the fence. The security guards pushed them along as they stumbled, children crying, women screaming, the men trying to salvage what they could.

“Can we at least pack up?” someone asked.

“It's all junk anyway. Just get out.”

In the commotion, none of the other guards had yet noticed that one of their own had fallen.

Sargam ran down the hill, dodging security guards.

“Hey!” a guard shouted. The other guards turned to where their colleague was standing, waving his flashlight.

“Man down.”

The crowd surged, pushing through the gap in the fence. Sargam joined the swelling crowd. She turned to Bailey. “I'll see you at your truck. One hour.” And slipped through the fence and on to where her motorcycle stood. She tossed her pack into a saddlebag and leaped to straddle the seat, taking the handlebars, opening the fuel valve, turning the key, and kickstarting the bike.

“Stop her!” one of the rent-a-cops shouted. “She's the one that did him.”

But the security guards had begun tossing what the families had left behind over the fence. Sleeping bags, T-shirts, jackets, shoes, pots and pans all flying over or catching in the tines at the top, and the crowd was so thick on the sidewalk against the fence that none of the guards could get through. Sargam roared off along the avenue beneath the underpass.

JEB AND BAILEY'S LITTLE GIRL,
Vanessa, was bent over double, sitting in the backseat of the Flex. A large octagonal bruise had formed, blue and black, where the boot had made contact with her side. She was running a fever, and Bailey sent the boy, Thomas, to the convenience store to get ice, which she wrapped in a plastic bag.

“Keep this against your sister's ribs. She's hurting.”

Tom nodded. Jeb secured what remained of their possessions in the cargo area of the Flex. He studied the dipstick; he didn't need to crawl under the car to get a look at the brake pads, which
he knew were worn through. He was keeping himself busy so that he did not have to look at his daughter.

While Bailey was showing the boy how to gently keep the ice on the bruise, a police car rolled up beside her. She felt the policeman's gaze without looking over and quickly put the ice away and lowered Vanessa's shirt.

The officer, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a hard-shell helmet, stepped out of the car.

“You subprimes were sleeping in the underpass?”

Jeb nodded.

“A security tech was badly injured there last night,” the officer said. “A gang of subprimes jumped him.”

“I didn't see nothing like that,” Jeb said.

“Beat him up pretty bad. He's in critical condition.”

“Like I said, we just rolled up our stuff and got out of there. Didn't see nothing.”

The officer looked inside the rolled-down window at the girl asleep on the rear seat of the Flex. “What's wrong with her?”

“Fever,” Bailey said.

The officer walked around the vehicle, noting the bald tires, sagging suspension, missing rear bumper. “License and registration.”

Jeb had a valid license, but the vehicle's registration was long since expired.

Jeb handed the license to the officer who returned to his squad car. Soon he was back, saying there was a warrant out for an unpaid citation for driving an unregistered vehicle.

“Officer, can you give me a break? Just, look, I need every dollar to feed my kids and for gas to get to a day's work.” Jeb shook his head. “I'm sorry that I couldn't pay that ticket.”

“I can arrest you, impound the vehicle,” the officer said. “Put you in credit rehab.”

“I know. But then what about my kids?”

“Subprimes and their kids.” The officer snorted. “Did you think about your kids before you stopped paying your mortgage? Or maybe thought about your circumstances before you even had kids?”

He looked around. “Tell you what. How much money do you have?”

Jeb turned to Bailey.

“Fifteen dollars,” she said.

“Give it to me,” said the officer.

“How am I gonna get to the lineup? Feed my kids?”

“You can walk.”

Bailey handed over the dirty bills.

The officer pocketed the money, pointed at Vanessa lying with her eyes closed on the backseat. “You should take her to a doctor, get that checked out.”

When he was gone, Bailey lifted the girl's shirt and applied the ice.

“What are we gonna do now?” Jeb asked.

“You don't think I'd give him our last money, do you?”

Jeb smiled. “How much?”

“I have a twenty in my bra.”

“That's not gonna get us far.”

“It'll get us fed, and you to work.”

He looked down the dusty road, the battered vehicles parked alongside it, the dried eucalyptus leaves, borne by hot, dry wind, scratching at the pavement. There was a narrow strip of cracked sidewalk lined by fencing, and beyond that, litter-strewn land owned by the Department of Public Works, a patch similar to where they had been sleeping. They had to get away from there.

A battered SUV pulled up alongside them; they recognized the wide eyes and dirty faces of a fellow subprime family from the underpass.

“How is your little girl?” the mother asked from behind the wheel.

“She's feeling it, that's for sure,” said Bailey.

“I'm sorry about that. Who would kick a little girl?”

The father leaned over from the passenger seat. “Where you headed?”

“Not far. We don't have the fuel to get anywhere.”

The man nodded.

“Heard they're looking for that girl, the one that talked politics. They're saying she's the one that did the tech.”

Jeb kept quiet.

The man continued: “Well, we're going to try for Nevada. It has to be better than here. They got abandoned houses where you can squat, thousands of them, you can just move right in.”

The mother revved the engine.

Their children were in the backseat, staring over. They waved to Tom, and he waved back sadly.

“It makes you think,” the father shouted as they drove away. “That woman was right, about this all being messed up, the unfairness . . .”

“You don't need to tell me,” Bailey said, turning back to her daughter.

“What are we waiting for?” Jeb asked. “Let's get moving. We have to find a spot for the night.”

“We're waiting for Sargam,” Bailey said. “She said she'd turn up back here.”

“She can't,” Jeb said. “If that tech dies, that's a murder rap. She's probably halfway to Mexico by now, or should be.”

“You're right,” Bailey said. “No point in waiting, I suppose.”

Vanessa sat up. “I'm hungry.”

Bailey smiled. “Thank God. Let's get you some food.”

Jeb started the Flex and the boy ran around to the rear passenger's-side door and climbed in. As they were about to pull away they heard a thumping on the rear tailgate. In his rearview Jeb saw a helmeted figure on a motorcycle.

“Sargam!” the boy shouted.

She was on the idling bike in her white leathers, her blue eyes visible beneath the flipped-up visor of her helmet. She came forward, pulling even with the driver's window.

“Follow me,” Sargam said, and tore off on the bike.

Jeb mashed the accelerator and the Flex lurched forward. He followed her down the paved arroyo and out of Huntington Park, past the Vernon walls and through the subdivisions in the shadows of the Vernon Natural Gas plant. They rode over the tracks, Jeb slowing down to spare his flattened suspension, into Maywood and Bell and then down toward the 710 Freeway, where she pulled up into the parking lot of an abandoned tire store next to the on-ramp.

Jeb stopped his vehicle beside her.

She removed her helmet and shook her hair loose.

“Girl, they are after you!” Bailey said.

“I know. I'm leaving. You should, too.”

“Where can we go? We can't afford a tank of gas.”

Sargam reached into her jacket and removed a hundred-dollar bill. “Here. Fill her up. Get the kids fed. How is Van?”

“I'm sore,” Vanessa said.

“I gave her a Tylenol. She says she's hungry. That's always a good sign,” Bailey said.

“It is,” Sargam agreed. “Get some gas, and let's get out of here.”

“Where to?” Jeb asked.

“Let's try Nevada.”

THE EIGHT-LANE PUBLIC ROAD ROSE
up over the exurban sprawl that stretched from the Pacific to Barstow, letting up only where the windmill vanes—vestiges of the era of legal rewewable energy—still cut their lazy spins through the hot air. The late-afternoon orange light woke the children, and Jeb adjusted the windshield visor while he drove. Sargam was on her motorcycle just ahead of them. They'd filled up on rice-and-bean burritos and bought a tank of gas, and they were all optimistic about the road ahead.

“They got houses there!” the boy was saying. “Can I have my own room?”

Bailey smiled. “Maybe. Now, these aren't mansions we're talkin' about. They're squats. Someone's old house that they didn't want anymore.”

“Why didn't they want it?”

“Well, they
did
want it. But like us, they couldn't pay for it.”

Tom thought back to the morning his family had loaded the Flex and driven west from Riverside. They'd still had Griff back then, the long-haired half-Lab. It had been a hot morning, but gray, overcast, unusually muggy for the high desert. His neighborhood looked much as it always had: carefully tended one-story homes with scant vegetation and yellowing lawns, streets without sidewalks, cars parked in driveways. The boy hadn't noticed the signs that the neighborhood was emptying. The lawns going brown, the weeds rising in cracks, the empty driveways, the padlocks on front doors. They weren't the first to leave, and by the time they did, driving out before the marshal chased them, their neighbors on either side had already abandoned their homes. As they were leaving, Tom saw his friends, Daniel and Terry, seated on their bikes in Daniel's driveway. He waved, and they waved back, and the boy thought about a blue hoodie he had left at Daniel's that he
would never get back, and how Terry's mom had once taken them ice skating.

And now they were leaving, and his mom and dad didn't even know where they were going. They would be staying in a hotel for a few nights, he had been told, and he was excited about that, imagining a swimming pool. But after that, where would they go?

His parents had no answers for that. They offered a vague reassurance that they would get by, that they were strong, that as long as they were together they would be okay. But why couldn't they just stay in their house?

How long ago had that been, the boy wondered. He couldn't guess. He had not been to school since, and he had trouble keeping track of the days. The hotel had been for just a few nights, and then there were a few nights with one of his uncles, and then a few more nights sleeping in the car, and then a few Ryanvilles, as his father drove the Flex around Los Angeles looking for work and a place to sleep. Griff had gone missing a few Ryanvilles back. He wandered off while they were sleeping, and the boy had cried when they had to pack up and leave without him and did not find consoling at all his mother's belief that Griff had “found a better home.” How could there be a better home than with them?

At first it had been fun, sort of like camping, or like being in an army on the march. You packed up every few days and moved out, but if you made any new friends, you left them behind and might never see them again. He missed his old friends, Daniel and Terry, and he never stopped missing Griff. They no longer had Internet access or cell phones—those had been cut off before they even moved out—and since free public wifi had been banned (in the National Right to Internet and Telecommunications Freedom Act), he had no way to stay in touch with his old
friends or his new ones. The first few days they took their meals in fast-food restaurants, but since then they ate what they could cook on a fire, or, if they were in a Ryanville where fires weren't allowed, they had cold sandwiches. The boy thought of his old house, and of Daniel and Terry and Griff, and dreamed that maybe in the next place, in this Nevada, they would have a little house and there would be kids there, not Daniel and Terry, he knew, but boys just like them, that he could have friends to go to school with.