The Subprimes (8 page)

I got a letter from the student loan the other day

I opened it. It said they would take my pay

You think an unemployed man gives a damn

About their garnishing or whatever?

 

I got a letter from you the other day

I opened it. It asked if I was free

You think I have anything holding me?

About two seconds flat and I was gone to you

The group gathered around the fire, sitting on broken-down lawn chairs, benches fashioned from salvage wood, and wool blankets spread on the dirt. The temperature had dropped and Sargam found herself pulling her leather jacket tight around her. The group had been singing along and hooting but now the guitar player was singing a softer song, in Spanish. A pack of dogs had gathered at the flickering edge of the light, watching the fire.

Darren found his way to where Sargam was standing. He had in his arms a blanket that he shook open and spread out.

She felt the hot air of the fire against her face. She looked at the happy people, all the faces made soft orange by the light, the easy smiles, the gentle nodding to the music. Why couldn't every one of these abandoned developments find this sort of low buzz of contentment?

It was not perfect, she knew. Darren had filled her in. The kids didn't have a school. The men were struggling to pay for the
gas that took them to those few menial jobs they could get. They would run out of wood. They would run out of propane. They would never run out of coyotes, dust, heat, sun, and cracked lips; everyone stank of sweat, and you couldn't keep yourself clean. But they were free here in a way they had never been back in their foreclosed homes, or in underpass Ryanvilles, or driving slow and scared down darkened highways.

Each of them had once been nominally the owner of a house or a condominium, and each had lost their job, their home, and had to set out on the road.

“It wasn't working for us anymore,” Darren said, “any more than it was working for whoever had once lived here and then had to leave. You know those abandoned Hopi cities? Or the Indian towns along the Gila River? The folks who lived there just . . . they got out. Like we did. There's no reason to stay anywhere anymore. We don't own nothing but ourselves.”

A few children had fallen asleep in the glow of the fire. Someone had laid a blanket over them.

“It's hard on the children, not going to a real school, but their parents didn't have a choice. You lose your home. You can wait around for the warrant, which you can't pay, and then you end up in debtors' prison—and how is that good for children? No, you have to run.”

She drowsed until the fire was embers, and then roused herself, leaving Darren asleep on the blanket.

SARGAM SLEPT IN A SLEEPING
bag in her abandoned house. The next morning, she made instant coffee in a tin cup over a Sterno can, and then went out to see the settlement already abuzz with activity. There were two dozen folks working in the vegetable plots, a boy tossing feed corn to chickens from a sack slung over his
shoulder, a few men pouring water from clear plastic drums into black plastic tubing. Sargam could see an improvised, rudimentary irrigation system, water spouting from black tubing pricked with holes. There were funnel-shaped valves every twenty-five yards along the tube, and the men walked down the tube, pouring from the drums. It was hot, sticky work, and had to be done before ten a.m. or you could get heatstroke in the furnace of the midday sun. By midmorning most everyone was indoors or in shade, the harsh, probing heat putting a hush on the community so that if you were just passing by, you might not guess there were over a hundred people scratching out a living from the earth and odd jobs.

Midafternoon, a black woman walked down Yucca, banging a pot with a wooden spoon, and slowly, and not without groans, a crew of children followed her to a stucco house at the end of the road, where they took seats on the floor or the back step. Using a whiteboard she had scavenged, she gave them some elementary lessons in mathematics and English, the children every bit as bored and resentful as if they were in the best of classrooms.

Sargam, wearing desert boots, jeans, and a T-shirt, wandered through the community, lending a hand in the fields, bending down to pull up radishes and beets while the women asked her where she was from, if she had a man or children.

Lest the women take her reluctance to answer these questions as standoffishness, Sargam explained as best she could. She didn't know her parents. She had never learned her given name. She had run away from her foster parents as soon as she reached puberty. She'd done plenty she wasn't proud of since then. She'd lied. She'd robbed. She'd stolen. She didn't tell them but they could figure out for themselves that she had lain with men for money.

It had been fifteen years since she left that foster home.

“That bike you rode in on,” one of them said. “Pretty bike. Where did you get it?”

“Stole it from a dude. A bad man. That was two thousand miles and three states ago.”

The women laughed. Sara, a blonde with a ridged forehead and a broad nose, stood up, wiped her arm across her brow, and asked, “How old are you?”

“I don't know my birthday. Thirty?” Sargam said. “I'm such a mutt. I've never seen an older version of me. Nothing to compare me to.”

The work was harder than any Sargam had done, and after an hour her upper back and shoulders were sore and she was grateful when the woman said that was enough for today.

“How come the men don't do any fieldwork?” Sargam asked.

“Oh, they do,” said Sara. “Most of them were up on a job in Standard. Construction. We need all the currency we can get. We pool what we have and somehow it's enough, but there's nothing put away. And the kids would like new sneakers. A new soccer ball. That's the part of this that still breaks my heart. My own daughters are growing up out here. How are we gonna get a Christmas tree? Forget the gifts under it.”

“I never had a tree,” Sargam said. “I turned out okay.”

Sara smiled. “With all due respect, you're a tough girl. I suppose our kids are gonna come up as hard people. You know, you want your kids to have a gentle childhood, but that won't serve them nowadays, will it?”

“I haven't seen much that I would call gentle since I've been on the road.” Sargam swung her hip out and knocked Sara a little sideways. “And who you calling tough?”

THAT NIGHT THERE WERE FIRES
set in split oil drums with wire grills laid across them, potatoes, carrots, and squash roasting alongside six plump chickens. Sara had set out pots of lentils and
pots of rice. The tired men and women and the eager children all waited their turn in line. They received one piece of chicken each, but as much vegetables, lentils, and rice as they could eat, and all the hot sauce they could want to spike it all with. From plastic cups they drank iced tea. They sat around eating on the blankets, benches, and lawn chairs, the fatigue from their day showing in their faces. After dinner, a few of them summoned the energy to join the kids in a pickup soccer game in the fading desert light.

Darren came over. He'd been on the work site all day, and he still had a thick leather work belt with his tools hanging low on his skinny hips. He set down his plastic plate, worked the belt free, and then took a seat next to Sargam.

“You're still here.” He smiled.

He took a forkful of rice and lentils and chewed slowly. “Most folks, a day picking will drive them off.”

“I could see why,” Sargam said. “It
is
an honest day's work.”

“But you can't beat the pay,” Darren said, holding up his plate.

“Or the company.”

Sargam could swear she saw Darren blush a shade at this before he turned away.

“Do you think this can last?” Sargam asked. “I've been riding around, and this is the first place I've come to where it seems to be working.”

“What?”

“This communal sort of life, share and share alike. It's a place built on fairness.”

“That's all we have. They took everything else. But they couldn't take a man's sense of what's right.”

“In another time they would call this—”

“Socialism,” Darren said. “I know.
Shhhh
. But I like ‘fairness.' That's a better word. You tell these folks here that we are practicing socialism, hell, they might pack up and leave.”

Sargam surveyed the plowed land, the grooved earth extending clear to the farthest reaches of the development, running between the houses and right up to the streets. “But the land, you can't stay here forever. Someone will want to restake their claim.”

“I know. If we can make it ten years we could make a case for adverse possession, but what are the odds of that? We'll get run off. But who knows? There's no market for these houses. Look at those old mining ghost towns. Nobody ever came back to claim those houses.”

Darren cleared his plate. One of the girls playing soccer scored a goal and the field erupted in cheers. An older boy ran down to retrieve the ball from between some squash plants, and somewhere in the distance a coyote howled, and then a dog from nearby barked an answer. A few men and women were hauling the pots of lentils and rice down toward a chicken pen, trailed by three hungry dogs. The sun sunk in an egg-yolk disc, and in those last moments before sliding down into the horizon, it sprayed orange and purple all across the sky and everyone's face glowed a pinkish hue so that they all looked ruddy and healthy.

A man in blue dungaree overalls tossed logs into the same pit as yesterday, and set to work making a fire.

“Can't see why anybody would ever leave,” Sargam said.

DARREN CAME TO HER IN
the night, after Sargam had spread out her sleeping bag and changed into the tank top and sweatpants she slept in. He gave a cautious knock at the door, two taps, and at first Sargam thought it might be a raccoon digging in the dirt, casting pebbles against the door. When he knocked again, she stood up, slipped on her jacket, and called out.

“It's me, Darren,” he said.

She walked over on bare feet and opened the door. He had a flashlight, which he shined down toward the floor.

“Hey there,” Sargam said.

“I was trying to think of a reason why I had to come and check on you, but I couldn't think of any.”

Sargam waved him in.

“How about just saying you wanted to see me?”

His pale skin was ghostly in the dark, and yellow up his arm in the peripheral light cast by his flashlight.

She was dark, her amber skin and black hair obscured in shadow so that he couldn't see where she ended and the rest of the world began.

Her white tank top was the clearest indicator of where she was. But Darren, unable to see Sargam's face, was having difficulty picking up any visual cues as to how welcome he really was.

“So, you're okay?” he said.

“Now, Darren, don't go all wishy-washy on me now. You had the moxie to come knocking on my door.”

She pulled him toward her and kissed him. They both smelled of hard work, and neither had washed, so the mutual stench was hardly off-putting. They hugged each other for a moment, as if trying to catch up with the surprising suddenness of their kiss.

Darren shined the flashlight around the living room.

Sargam had cleaned out the place, tossing the empty cans, cigarette butts, and plastic water bottles into a garbage bag that she had discarded in one of the bathrooms. With a borrowed broom she had swept out the living room and even drilled a U-bolt lock into one of the cabinets to secure her pack while she was out. She had laid some newspaper under her bike to sop the fluids and was planning on replacing the oil-pan gasket to stop the oil leak. The room had the pleasant, slightly sweet smell of bike oil and metal mixed with some desert rosemary coming in through the open window.

“How's the bike?” Darren asked, as if worried that she might leave as soon as she had done her repairs.

“I could get it done in a day or two, if I wanted. But I've met some interesting folks and thought I might stick around.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“This one really hot guy, a socialist.”

“How could you ever fall for one of them?”

They kissed again and made their way to Sargam's bedroll.

It had been a few months since Sargam had been with a man, and it took some getting used to—the shape and length of his body. He was long and bony, skinny-legged and flat-stomached, with a few sparse blond chest hairs. He was delicate in the beginning as they kissed, but then became rough and insistent with his lips and tongue in a way that she liked. It became clear they were going to make love, their urgency as they kissed and grabbed each other, her hands pulling down his jeans, his reaching inside her sweats. When their pants were off, she guided his penis so the head was against her vulva, but did not guide further. She wanted him to have to work his way in. She was wet and open and he slid inside in stages and she gasped at his length, pushed back against him and she came just after he did, shaking in small shivers as she caught her breath.

Later, as they lay together, the coyotes were howling again, an impatient chorus that seemed uncomfortably close, as if they were just out of sight, behind the wall, an arm's length away. When Sargam sat up in the night, listening, she checked beside her for Darren, but he was gone. By then the coyotes had quieted, but there wasn't silence, for they were so near Sargam thought she could hear their short, quick breaths.

P
ASTOR ROGER WAS DEADLY OUT
to about eighteen feet, but beyond that his prayers went unanswered as he clanked everything off the front of the rim. At eight a.m., every day save Sunday, he played his three-on-three basketball game, dribbling and shooting on the actual court where the San Antonio Spurs had won multiple NBA titles. He had had that very court ripped up, plank by plank, and relaid here in the office compound of his mega-church, which at one point had been the home stadium of the Dallas Cowboys. His body man, a former Los Angeles Jaguars fullback, Devin Dudley, and security man and former Texas State small forward, Gerald Nutley, were his teammates and they regularly thrashed their opposition, primarily because nobody was willing to hard-foul Pastor Roger during his infrequent drives to the hoop.

Pastor Roger was a shoot-first, pass-never point guard whose teammates had better be good rebounders and defenders,
because that was the only way they would ever get the ball. When Anderson Cooper from
60 Minutes
asked him about his style of play, Pastor Roger described himself as a facilitator, a player who sacrificed his own numbers so that his teammates might thrive. And he truly believed what he was saying, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Yet the image of the humble pastor playing his daily basketball game had stuck and scored very highly in his director of communications' eight-tier pyramid of relatability, which the pastor and his DOC studied daily in search of ways to make Pastor Roger more famous, and to secure for him more radio-station clears, congregants, and tithings.

The pastor swished his last shot, an unguarded fifteen-footer, shook the hands of his opponents, and came to the glassed-in room facing the court, where waiting for him in a plush chair was Arthur Mack, whose bail Pastor Roger himself had put up. His own attorneys had pledged to ensure that the controversial “financial advisor” was not a flight risk and agreed to pay for the tracking anklet now clasped to Arthur's leg.

Pastor Roger sat down and wiped his face with a small white towel. His body man handed him a bottle of water, which he sipped as he settled his breathing.

“Arthur, do you know why I have vouched for you? Invited you to an audience with me?”

Arthur had been wondering about this very fact for the entire flight down. The pastor's private jet had all the usual perks of lavish travel—burnished hardwood paneled cabin, the wide, spacious seats, the catered spread of almost edible sandwiches—save one: the liquor. There was nothing to drink on the plane but decaffeinated Coca-Cola and bottled water. Denied the distraction of 7-and-7s, as the plane banked between columns of smoke cast from prairie burning throughout the firebelt of Missouri,
Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, Arthur had wrestled with the notion of why Pastor Roger would send a jet for him and ultimately concluded that no matter what the pastor had in store for him, it was better than Rikers Island or the Turtle Bay apartment where he had been hiding out since he made bail. It was owned by his mistress's father, an Iranian Jew of considerable girth who suspected that Arthur still had millions stashed away and regularly demanded the return of his half-million-dollar investment, which Arthur had in fact lost along with every other dollar of dumb money in his care. His mistress, a pretty, hirsute brunette who spent most of her hours in various depilation and epilation procedures, had remained loyal to Arthur, turning up at the courthouse every day he had to appear and even visiting him at the Downtown Detention Center when he was locked up there.

Yet he had grown tired of her loyalty, and restless in his new life of house arrest, so that when Pastor Roger called, offering to pull strings and arrange for his visit to Texas, he leaped at the chance. Apparently, Arthur had become something of a folk hero down there as an alleged victim of regulatory overreach.

“Son, when it gets to the point an American can't build a profitable business without the federal government coming in and tearing it down, well, that's the point at which we may need to revisit the Constitution and remind our countrymen of our inalienable rights.”

Arthur was slow to accept the notion that he was the victim of overregulation, rather than the perpetrator of a fraud, as that had not previously seemed a promising legal strategy, but as a potential for a new line of work, that of Free Market Hero and Regulator Fighter, he was coming to embrace the concept, though he was having trouble with the details.

Pastor Roger, having rehydrated from his basketball game,
was telling Arthur that he first had to repent for his sins. He had strayed from his marriage—was he in touch with his wife? would she be open to coming to Dallas for a reconciliation service performed by Pastor Roger?—and had abandoned his children—could they come down? Pastor Roger would love to have them onstage during a sermon. His redemptions always started in the home, with family.

“We've all sinned. That's the meaning of being born again. We come to Jesus, we repent, and we move on. No harm, no foul,” said Pastor Roger. His voice, a soft twang, gentle, prone to cracking and sometimes on the verge of tears. It was a voice famous throughout the nation, from his radio shows and televised sermons and his numerous appearances alongside politicians, celebrities, and troubled reality-TV stars. He had been on Oprah's couch so many times he was rumored to be her successor. He had published twenty-seven best-selling books, each with his blue eyes and aspirin-white teeth gleaming on the cover. Yet Arthur, not an avid media devotee, knew only that Pastor Roger was famous, and rich, and powerful.

Pastor Roger sized up the material the Lord had given him. Arthur Mack was a handsome man, with good carriage and fine Caucasian features, but he lacked a certain cunning around the eyes. He was not, Pastor Roger quickly assessed, a complex thinker.

“Do you know where your wife and children are?” Pastor Roger asked.

“Sure. Um, I think so.”

“Do you understand what you are being given here?”

“Yeah, I, um . . . what are you giving me again?”

“Redemption!”

“Right, yeah, redemption.”

He had been driven in from the jet in a black Escalade V24
Turbo—the lowest-gas-mileage passenger vehicle currently sold in the United States—and escorted into the Freedom Prairie Church, where he was met by a man with white hair and a black suit, Steven Shopper, director of communications for the FPC. Shopper led him around the church's vast nave, the Dallas Cowboys' former field covered with planks and carpeted and filled with seats that rose to where the stands had been. There were four waterfalls gurgling over large, brown rock formations built into the stands down to where the sidelines once were. The old stadium benches had been removed and replaced with chairs angled toward the pulpit and its 150-foot-wide screen so that the 78,000 who gathered here three times every Sunday and once on Mondays and Saturdays could watch Pastor Roger give his tearful sermons. There was now actually more advertising signage than there had been when it was a football stadium. Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell, Dell-Hewlett and Pepper Industries signs were everywhere. The great Freedom Prairie Church was empty, save for a few technicians on the distant stage who had gathered to look at a tablet. Arthur was led to the edge of the nave, to where the fifty-yard-line seats once were, and then through the old tunnel, past where the concessionaires had sold nachos and churros, where congregants now could buy Jesus Man action figures and Jesus Freak T-shirts, mugs, caps, key chains, beverage cozies, and iPhone cases; and down the elevator to Pastor Roger's office complex and family area, where he was ushered into a glassed-in room where he was to wait while the pastor played his daily three-on-three.

Pastor Roger was surprisingly fit for a man in his fifties, looking like a cross between Andrew Jackson and one of the Jonas Brothers, that long, stern American face softened by a curly poof of dyed-black hair and skin peeled to a curry-powder taupe.

Arthur asked him, “So, what about my defense?”

“Get some rest,” Pastor Roger said. “We have guest rooms off the vestry. And then we'll get you down to the studio and have you come on the show. Today! We're gonna talk about your case and how vital to God's will and American energy independence the trading in carbon credits really is. What you were doing was the Lord's work, only the markets turned against you, and then the regulators stabbed you in the back, isn't that right, son?”

Arthur mouthed the words “God's work” and stood.

“Now get some rest, have a healthy breakfast. We serve six kinds of bacon, you know.”

Steve Shopper reappeared and said he would be helping Arthur to settle in and get comfortable, and also guide Arthur through the messaging.

“We love this story,” said Steve Shopper as he led Arthur into the hall. “There's been a rush to judgment, an unwillingness to understand that if what you were doing was wrong, then what Sam Walton and Henry Ford and T. Boone Pickens did was also wrong. The teachings of Ayn Rand are clear: you make your own dollar, damnit and damn the rest. You know what your mistake was? Trying to make that red-blooded American dollar in that un-American New York City. Yankee lawyers don't understand that the carbon credit derivative business is the underpinning of our energy independence.”

Arthur nodded. They were walking past the vast support struts of the old stadium, the morning sun blasting through the glassed-in walls and the huge stained-glass effigies of Jesus Christ and Pastor Roger. The old mezzanine floor had been carpeted a plush green, and the walls painted rust and orange and sienna, and from the ceiling, which was terraced upward beneath the upper decks, hung gold and silver and blue banners, like little pennants with fleurs-de-lis embroidered all over them.

Steve Shopper showed Arthur into a room where he was immediately assaulted by the artificial cold. There were three overstuffed leather sofas surrounding a shiny varnished oak table. On the wall were framed oil paintings of Pastor Roger on horseback, stalking through brush holding a rifle, and at the wheel of a large SUV, flanked by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Through a large passage was a dining room with seating for twelve, and off this room was a hallway to a bedroom and bathroom.

“There's a kitchen behind the dining room. Are you hungry? Just pick up the phone and a chef will bring up some bacon.”

“Doesn't the pastor need this room?”

“Oh, this is a guest room. There are twenty-five like it. For special guests to his sermons.”

Arthur sat down on one of the sofas. “It's freezing in here.”

“Isn't it wonderful!” Steve Shopper smiled. “You'll get some rest, a short nap, and we'll go over your talking points.”

It was too cold to lie down. Arthur got up and walked around the room and made his way down the hall to the bedroom. There was a single bed with a folded-over sheet and a thin blanket. He would have loved a drink, but he knew without asking that there probably wasn't a beer to be had in the whole complex. He arranged himself on the bed, pulling the thin blanket over him.

Arthur Mack was cold, and uncomfortable, and unsure of why exactly he was here, but he recognized opportunity, just as he had those years ago when he started his hedge fund. But what he felt, more powerfully than he had ever felt before, was a strange sense that he had at last found his flock, that these were folks who understood him, who really appreciated him. They get me, he thought, they really, really get me.

PASTOR ROGER WAS SPEAKING INTO
a microphone and facing a camera in a darkened TV studio, one of a half-dozen in the bowels of the stadium where he did postproduction on his own sermons, or could appear as a guest on any of a series of KIK-TV or Fox News shows. He had grown up in television. His grandfather was a televangelist preaching mainstream Southern Baptist Conference liturgy who'd had the brainstorm of buying his own television stations in several Texas markets, the better to spread his own Sunday message. As a child, Pastor Roger picked up the technical aspects of putting on a Sunday devotional service, learning how to adjust the lighting around the platform, as his grandfather called the area around the pulpit. Working behind the scenes suited the shy, soft-spoken boy. By the time he was seventeen, he was producing his grandfather's show and had a network executive's understanding of television markets—time slots, lead-ins, and cost-per-ratings points. Pastor Billy vigorously preached the message every Sunday until he was eighty-six, when he wound up in a Dallas hospital and turned to young Roger and urged him to take the platform.

Pastor Roger, already in his late twenties, a dropout who had completed a year and a half at Oral Roberts, had never spoken in public, yet that first Sunday as he did the noon service he felt the power of God speaking through him. He carried on his grandfather's message of stern self-reliance but found himself adding to it huge dollops of American exceptionalism, free-market glorification, and Ayn Rand objectivism. He had always loved America, of course, but he was surprised by the virulence of his words, his assertion of the market as the hand of God, and of government regulation as the devil's claw. He combined this with a promise to his congregants that if they believed in God, and if they continued to congregate in the Church of Texas, as it was then called, that they too would be made wealthy by the free
market. God wants us all to be rich, he assured his flock every Sunday. God wants us to have a big life, a gigantic life, a ten-thousand-square-foot-mansion-and-a-rib-eye-every-night kind of life. Do you know who is blocking that connection to God?

And the congregants would cry out: Big Government. The Regulators. The Environmentalists. The Progressives. The Takers.

He had surprised himself by his hatred of all those who stood in the way of progress, who disputed that God had given man dominion over all the fish of the sea and birds of the air, over all the livestock, over all the Earth. All of it, Pastor Roger would pound the pulpit, all of it. Every rock. Every tree. Every drop. It is ours to use! Those who would deny us that dominion? They are the enemies of God.