The Subprimes (23 page)

The vehicle, a battered Prius, slowed at the sight of the men waving them down at the head of the off-ramp.

“Hey there,” Darren said. “What can we do for you?”

“I'm looking for my girls,” Gemma said.

Darren knew about the sisters who had shown up out of the desert. Against his advice, Sargam said they could stay, at least until their mother was contacted. And here she was.

“Okay,” Darren said, “keep driving down this road. Stop in at the third house on the first street you come to. Sargam should be in there. But go slow. We got kids running around all over the place.”

Richie put the car back into gear, but before he could press the gas, Darren asked, “Hey, what are they saying about us out there?”

Richie thought about it. “They're saying . . . well, the TV is saying how you're trespassing, violating private property, and how the state gave the Pepper Sisters this land.”

Darren shook his head.

Richie continued. “But everywhere you go, you see people with signs that say ‘People Helping People' or ‘Sargam Forever' or ‘Valence Rules.' People know what you're doing out here, they do.”

Richie steered the car down the off-ramp and stopped at the third house, where four women were sitting on wood and brick benches before a bonfire, knitting in the flickering light. Sargam was framed in the doorway, the flames giving her an orange glow as she studied them.

“Howdy,” Sargam said. “I didn't think they were letting anyone in—”

As soon as she saw Gemma and Richie get out of the car she knew they weren't subprimes; their vehicle wasn't packed with a lifetime's detritus the way most folks' were when they rolled in.

Gemma was upon Sargam so quickly that the women around the campfire rose as if to defend her.

“My girls,” Gemma demanded. “Where are they?”

Sargam knew immediately who Gemma was referring to, as did the other women, who sat back down.

“They should be over on the next block, at the end of Las Lomas,” she said and hugged Gemma. “Those are some tough girls. Survived a coyote attack?”

The tale of the little girls coming out of the desert, one of whom had survived a coyote attack, and had the scars to prove it, had spread through Valence. It was taken as a good omen that with the roads closed and the marshals and state police and security techs closing in, two little girls could just walk right in.

“Leave the vehicle at the end of the block,” Sargam said. “It's a short walk, I'll take you.”

The figure she cut, the confidence of her stride, the pleasing symmetry of her dark features, the shimmer of her wavy hair reflecting the firelight, rendered her more impressive in person
than she seemed on television. As they all followed her down a path through front yards of radish and onion patches, and tomato vines on sticks rising overhead, Richie was surprised at the contradiction between this fertile land and the desert they had just traversed. It was as if someone had figured out how to take what was best about Burning Man, shed all the druggie crap and psychedelic costumes, and somehow make a go of it.

Or was it just his exhaustion—his two days of driving, his intoxication at being with Gemma, his excitement at Gemma getting her kids back?

They saw children playing in the street, riding bicycles and skateboards, the growling sound of bicycles tires on concrete audible before they could see clearly the lithe bodies darting in the half-light of dusk.

“Mommy! Mommy!” From out of the shadows came the two girls in torn dresses, both smiling and dirty-faced but somehow happier than Gemma had ever seen them. “You came!”

She hugged them to her, kissing each on their crowns, and then hugged them again. “You're both so brave,” she said.

The girls were giggling, and now all three of them were teary. They held each other in silence.

“We made so many new friends,” Ginny said when they released each other.

“Everyone here is nice,” Franny said.

Gemma grabbed them again and hugged them, and turned to Sargam. “Thank you.”

“Thank
her
. This is Bailey”—and she pointed to a woman with reddish hair.

“Well, then, thank you.”

Gemma looked at Richie, suddenly unsure of what they should do. Were they really just going to get back in the car and drive off? And go where?

Ronin and Jinx had both drifted down the block, to where the rest of the kids had resumed playing a game involving skateboards and bicycles. While Richie could not quite figure out the rules, the sight of the bodies in motion, the aggressive pumping and pedaling and chasing and grabbing, the shriek when a child was caught, the wail of a little boy falling off a skateboard and scraping his knee, he found the savagery of the game reassuring. The contest appeared brutal and complicated but had a certain order to it, in the way bigger kids mainly chased down other bigger kids, while the younger kids were spared the worst of the violence. It dawned on Richie why this was so fascinating: he had not seen kids playing with this kind of abandon since, well, since he received a summons for endangering minors after a football game. This was the kind of play he remembered from his own childhood. There was no cell phone or game console in sight. This was good, clean violence.

He watched, amazed, as Ronin, encouraged by the other kids, jumped on a skateboard and navigated between the patrolling bikers to the opposite curb, where he jumped off. Ronin had divined, on his own, the rules, or at least well enough to jump into a game he had never played before with kids he just met. Richie knew that Ronin's doing this back home in Pacific Palisades was inconceivable; he would have been too shy, would have made an excuse about not knowing the rules. He would have been afraid of embarrassing himself.

Gemma observed Richie watching his son, and was about to ask what they should do now, when both her girls started jumping up and down, screaming, “Can we stay? Please, please, Mom,
please
. Can we stay?”

I AM MESMERIZED BY THE
sight of my son, who became animated and alive and unaware of himself for maybe the first time
in months. And after a few minutes, after Ginny and Franny return to the game, Jinx joins in, and I watch my children play in the dark night in a manner that is at once totally familiar and completely novel. I remember hurried football games and ditch games and capture-the-flag and round-the-block and jailbreak played after dinner on summer nights, the thrill of running in the dark, of hiding in the gloaming. It is novel because I have so rarely seen my children this free.

Gemma and Sargam are talking to each other, Gemma giving Sargam the long story about how we got here, and then they both turn and look at me, and Gemma shrugs to Sargam as if to say, What can I say?

I know before they come over to me that we are spending the night here.

We leave the kids playing their game and wander back with Sargam to the threshold where we first saw her. She leads us to the back of the house, where a communal kitchen is set up, large, scrubbed cylindrical pots are upside down to dry, a few hundred mismatched plates piled on a sturdy plank table, cups and glasses in stacked roller-cases with their tops ripped off. One pot simmers on a fire, and Sargam ladles us out a black bean stew, and as soon as I smell the food I realize how hungry I am.

Gemma and I both sit down on a log bench and spoon the stew into our mouths. The food is earthy and smoky, and while the first bite seems bland, the flavors grow on me, some kind of meat, seasoned with cilantro, onions, chipotle, garlic, and salt, so that after a few mouthfuls, I can't imagine anything I would rather be eating. We wash it down with cups of water.

“What's the meat?” I ask Sargam.

“Rabbit, goat, maybe snake,” she says. “Definitely some lobster. Cans of the stuff have been donated—by the pallet.”

“Of course,” I say. “It's delicious.”

“I take it you two are bedding down together?” Sargam says.

Gemma and I both shrug and nod.

Sargam says that we can sleep in one of the houses on the western edge of Valence, on a street called Temecula. It's one of the last uninhabited houses. There are spare sleeping bags and bedding, if that's what we need.

We thank her.

“How long can you hold out?” I ask.

“Forever.”

“But how?”

“People helping people,” she says.

She can see that I'm skeptical. “This isn't some kind of Masada here,” she says. “We're not martyrs. We're families.”

“But, Pastor Roger, HG Extraction, they are an army.”

She looks at me. “I feel like I'm talking to a reporter.”

“You are,” says Gemma.

“Sort of,” I insist.

“He's a really bad reporter,” Gemma says. “Terrible. Lazy. Can't get anything right. Always getting sued. Getting sued, in fact, by Pastor Roger.”

Sargam is clearly amused. “Then you can't be all bad.”

“Oh, he's not,” laughs Gemma. “I'm sweet on him.”

She winks at me.

I've never felt so happy.

“I want to write this story, your story,” I blurt out. I suppose I have been thinking this the whole time, the whole drive out here, but this is the first time I've put it into words. Suddenly, an old passion and excitement has reawakened and I feel a sense of mission about my work that I haven't had in decades. (Or maybe ever.) I want to tell a great story, a true story, an important story—a story that's messy and beautiful and subversive and uplifting. I now know why I've come.

“I'm not a TV reporter,” I say. “I don't have cameras. I'm not even sure I have a place to publish. I just want to stay here and write about you, and about being here.”

“Will you write the truth?” Sargam asks.

“I don't know. I'm not sure I know what truth is. I'll write what I see and feel.”

She smiles. “That's good enough for me.”

After dinner I call Rajiv, plugging my cell phone into the car charger. He's on the heli-shuttle home, and I can barely hear him over the whirring of the rotors.

“I'm in Valence,” I say.

“We have two drones overhead and a whole trailer full of terminal guys covering that.”

“But I'm
inside
. They're all in their air-conditioned trailer back in Placer. I'm, I just had dinner with Sargam. She'll let me live here among them, tell their story. Access, Rajiv.”

Rajiv thinks this over. “It
is
unlikely Sargam would sue you, considering the circumstances.”

“Come on!”

“If only we could remove you and replace you with someone more competent,” Rajiv says.

“A more competent person would never have ended up in this situation.”

“How
did
you end up there?”

“I'm on the run,” I say.

“From what?”

I'm not exactly sure. “Everything?”

I realize the true value of what I am offering Rajiv and his magazine. “You should be fucking thanking me for calling you first, you ingrate.”

“We do still pay you many thousands of dollars a month.”

Oh, yeah. “Fair point.”

“And until this phone call, well, I don't need to remind you of exactly why we were doing that.”

“Because of the lawsuits,” I say. “But now I can make it all up to you.”

“We'll see,” Rajiv says. “Let me run it by Richard. But, yes, proceed.”

AFTER PLAYING THEIR GAME—HELICOPTER, THE
kids called it—and then eating their bowls of stew, Ronin headed off with the boys, and Jinx and Ginny and Franny went with Gemma to the house assigned them by Sargam. It was a wreck, of course, but Gemma spread out the sleeping bags in a rear bedroom, rolled up a T-shirt for each to use as a pillow, and the three, exhausted from days of driving and their running and playing, fell asleep as soon as they were horizontal. Gemma walked outside, the faint stirring of a breeze a whisper of relief after the steady all-day heat.

Ronin was crawling along on his belly, following Tom and Juan and Vlad and the rest of the Gorillas on a mission to survey the community's western flank. They paused at the woman standing in the moonlight, the newcomer, and Ronin admired her too as if he hadn't just spent two days in a cramped car with her.

None of the boys said it, for that's not what boys that age talk about, but each thought it: She's pretty. Quickly, however, they returned to the work at hand, to slither into that cornfield and beyond to scout enemy positions.

Tom once read that superior knowledge of the disposition, strength, and location of a formal enemy's organized columns was one of the advantages insurgent forces held in an asymmetrical conflict. The Gorillas already possessed superior geographical knowledge, knowing every culvert and ditch
and obscured sightline in the two square miles of Valence and throughout the surrounding desert. They had observed the enemy for days, and as they crawled out to undertake even more recon, a few of the boys were voicing complaints about the rigors of the mission.

“My stomach hurts from so much crawling,” said Juan.

Ronin thought the same thing, but found the mission itself exciting. It reminded him of a
Call of Duty
scenario, only without the cool weapons.

“Then turn around and go home,” said Tom. “We are going to figure out where they are going to come from, and then how to attack them where they are most vulnerable.”

Ronin liked the sound of that. He had already been sworn to secrecy by the rest of the Gorillas, and now he knew why.

The boys crawled through the corn, down a gully, and into a flat-bottomed cement drain with slanted edges. They ran along it for a few hundred feet, until they reached the edge of a field from which they could see the lights of the enemy vehicles, the massing of SUVs parked there in the dark.

“When do you think they'll come?” Ronin asked.