The Tribes of Palos Verdes (20 page)

I write him a letter, shove it under his door.

Jim,

We better stick together now.

Please take me with you when you go out at night.

We're a tribe, no matter what.

Love, me.

While I wait for him to come back, I concentrate on cutting out pictures from
Surfer
magazine, making a collage of all the lush, beautiful places beyond Palos Verdes: Hawaii, Bali, Java, Australia. I'm going to give the collage to Jim for our birthday, so he'll imagine the places we can run to.

There's a picture of Frieda Zane on a wave in Eccles, Australia. She's crouched low on the board for balance, her arms barely raised off the water, skimming. Even though the wave is as big as an apartment building, she's riding through it, smiling, navigating its power with calm, graceful finesse.

“It's not impossible,” I say out loud, rehearsing what I'm going to tell Jim. “We'll get out of here, no matter how hard it looks.”

I know my brother will forget about fire, once he remembers about water.

*   *   *

At 5:00
A.M.
that morning I find Jim on the floor, hidden from view, burrowed under blankets and books. The tortoises are loose, under the sheets with him. I pound on his shoulder softly, afraid when he won't move. He emerges after a while rubbing his eyes, looking at me as if I were very far away. His hair is tangled, unwashed, crumpled in snaky coils.

“Room service?”

“Jim, don't make jokes, because I'm serious. I think we should do what Jody Ferguson did.”

Jody Ferguson, age thirteen, hit herself with a paperweight and scraped her knees and face on the sidewalk. Then she went to the school counselor, showed him the welts, the bruises, the scrapes. She told him it was her dad that hit her. She never told them what her father
really
did, but she wrote a letter to Janie Tricot, explaining everything.

Her dad used to touch her at night, when her mother went to sleep. He touched her in places fathers should never touch.

After Jody went to the counselor, the police moved very quickly.

Within twenty-four hours she was living in another state in a group home. A place beyond the reach of her parents.

“We could do that,” I whisper matter-of-factly. “You can do the same thing, then I'll run away, too. No one would ever know about the fires.”

“No,” Jim says after a while, shaking his head. He sighs, hoisting a tortoise onto his chest, running his hand over its smooth shell. It pokes its head out and then pulls back quickly.

“Why not?” I ask, still whispering.

“I'm finished with lying.”

I hear a noise in the bush, so I dive low. When an opossum crawls past, I relax again. “There's another way. We could stay together if we do it.”

I tell him there's money hidden at our father's house. I say I'll steal it and we can run away to Hawaii. “We can always repay it later.” I give him the collage, and he looks at it, tears in his eyes.

“But what about the thing you said about tribes?” he asks.

“Which thing?”

“If you leave, you die. Period.”

“We're our own tribe,” I say. “Just me and you.”

Jim thinks. He says he'll never escape this place. But he says he's in anyway. We do the secret handshake, then I crawl under his blanket and fall back into an exhausted sleep, smiling.

“Don't smile when you sleep, it's bad luck,” Jim warns, shaking me.

*   *   *

The Dixons are the only family on Via Neve. They don't go to Mexico or Hawaii because their son is on a dialysis machine for his kidneys.

Tonight, Mrs. Dixon sits on the porch fanning herself with a Chinese screened fan, wearing a scarf over her nose, toasting the air. She holds the glass up to us as I walk past.

“Here's to the tide turning!” she says, jubilant.

*   *   *

My mother is baking cookies. The smell of red tide is almost overpowered by the scent of melting chocolate and butter. Jim is staring at my mother as she bustles around.

“They'll be ready in a minute,” she tells Jim. “They're special for your birthday.”

“They're burning, Mom, can't you smell it?” Jim says.

“Sweetie, they aren't burning at all, they are almost ready.”

She is shoveling out crisp, golden brown Toll House cookies onto the countertop with a spatula when Jim douses them with a full bottle of beer.

“Why do you burn everything?” Jim asks.

*   *   *

He's in his room now, sitting on his bed, listening to soft music in the dark. When I knock on his door, he sticks his head out, saying, “Shhh. I'm packing.”

I see his wet suit in the trash can, and his favorite board-shorts, too.

“You better take your wet suit,” I say. “I'm sure you'll need it.”

He shakes his head, no. Then he hugs me and pushes me out the door.

*   *   *

At the end of the driveway, Jim is uncoiling a length of rope. His backpack is open. The tortoises are in the inner pocket, each wrapped in a towel. In the outer pouch is lighter fluid and a bottle of Bacardi 151.

“You know what Mom gave me as a gift?” Jim asks.

I don't answer, because I'm looking at the rope, scared.

“Look at this.”

He takes out a perfect square-cut diamond; it flashes in the dark. Then he looks out at the ocean. “See ya,” he says calmly, throwing the diamond far over the cliff. When he picks up the lighter fluid, I grab his hand.

“We don't have to burn anything. Let's just run for it like we planned.”

“Did you ever think that I had a plan, all by my stupid, slow, idiot self? Or do you think only you can come up with plans?”

*   *   *

Water and fire sound the same when they hiss. The coil of rope curls and cracks when Jim strikes the pack of matches and lights the end, as if he's going to light a cigarette. It bursts into flame, and he throws it toward the dry festuca grass, a snake on fire. The grass goes up in flame as he laughs and beats his stomach with the small of his hand.

“It's over, it's really over,” he whispers, lighting a match, burning another piece of snaky rope.

As the fire begins, Jim breathes deeply, closing his eyes.

I crouch low, ready to run, watching a bush burn. Coils of orange rope are wrapped around my brother's neck like African beads.

“You promise we'll stick together,” I say, the hair rising on my neck.

“Sorry, Medina, I'm not going to promise anyone anything ever again.” He throws the bottle of Bacardi high into the air, until it breaks on the grass and ignites; then he giggles into his hand.

“Run, run, run, as fast as you can, genius, get fucking out of here.” He kisses me quickly on the mouth, and takes off down the trail to the beach. The eucalyptus begins to bend, the fuchsias melt in orange streaks. The flames rise and snap.

I sprint down the trail, through wind, fire, and water, the smell of fish in my nose, following my brother, slipping on seaweed. Lodged in the rocks are silvery bonito, dead but still shining. Stars fall, a flicker, smoke, blackness, then another flicker.

I crash through muddy tide pools, calling my brother's name, ducking from a frenzy of seagulls flapping past to circle the fire.

“Faster,” Jim calls. “I'll race you.” He leads by twenty feet. I fall and get up again. Jim stops, watching me get up, then throws a pebble, giggling, looking up into the sky.

He yells, cupping his mouth like a megaphone, “Hey, see that star? That's my present to you. Happy birthday.”

I hear his feet running on the sand, then he stops to shake the tortoises out of his backpack gently. He runs again.

“Wait,” I shout, running into the dark, and falling over another rock.

But Jim is beyond my reach.

*   *   *

They use special machines to clean the sands of Palos Verdes, yellow tractors that thresh, mix, and spit out the crystals into fine, white powder. It is one of these machines that finds Jim, facedown, at Helsa Cove, five miles beyond Angel Point. Naked, stripped bare, wet, with a faint red welt on his back and kidney area.

The driver of the Sand Machine grabs a stick from the front cab, a stick usually used for fighting off stray dogs. Today he uses the stick to turn Jim over. Jim grumbles and then screams at the man.

The man uses his radio to call base, and they send backup, another yellow Sand Machine, with another bewildered driver with a dog stick.

Jim tries to rise, but falls back into the sand, mumbling incoherently about sunsets and motherfuckers and fire. His eyes are freshly sown with Pratt Point acid. His arms scratch at the sky, trying to turn it off as it lightens to daylight.

“My God! It's Jim Mason, that kid from Via Neve…”

The backup driver, a surfer from Lunada Point, moves fast, panicking.

“Call the police. I'll stay here with him.”

Jim is picked up by the police and placed carefully in a white van, whisked away to Palos Verdes Mental Health Clinic, which isn't in Palos Verdes at all. Later they take him to Camarillo State Hospital for the criminally insane. He gives the television camera a hang-loose sign as he leaves. “See ya,” he says.

“Suspected Palos Verdes Arsonist Nabbed,” the papers say.

In the hospital, my mother corners a nervous young nurse, telling him to call all the best hotels in Europe, certain that he can find Phil Mason.

Instead, the nurse asks questions. He asks if Jim has been smoking cocaine regularly, and how often he's been taking methamphetamines. My mother is silent for a moment, rocking back and forth in her chair.

“You better let me see him,” my mother finally says. “He needs me.”

Soon after, the Palos Verdes police come to ask questions, badges glittering, mouths moving slowly.

“Did you ever see him start a fire?” they ask us.

“Never,” my mother cuts in quickly.

“Did he have a chronic cocaine problem, or an addiction of any kind?” the police probe kindly.

“He took a few pills, smoked a little pot,” I tell them, exhausted. “But those weren't the problem.”

Salt

 

 

I live in Santa Barbara now at Gate School, the best girls' school in California, two hours north of Palos Verdes. When my father returned, he sent me here, giving me a gold card, crying, kissing me again and again.

I have new clothes, a silver pen, a leather backpack. They sit in the closet, while I wear my brother's old clothes. I pull his big wet suit on, standing on the sand, wrapping duct tape around the legs and arms for insulation.

The water is colder in Santa Barbara, murkier, blacker. I try to feel the old rush of motion, but I always end up near the shore.

*   *   *

Jim wasn't a good arsonist. The house on Via Neve is still standing. Only the fuchsias and the eucalyptus trees burned, plus half of the old palm. The new gardener is replacing them.

A few more fires happened before they caught the real pyromaniac, a local forty-two-year-old structural engineer. A weekend volunteer in the fire-watch posse.

“Starting fires is beautiful, almost spiritual,” he said in his confession. “People run around like ants, while I just stand back and watch them.”

Marge Paxton gave an interview to the
Times.
“He seemed like such a nice man. He always brought good wine to our barbecues.”

His daughter wouldn't give an interview, but they photographed her as she tried to leave her house. I barely recognized the frightened expression on her face.

I knew her as a towel girl.

*   *   *

The doctors call my brother's escape plan a severe schizophrenic break, aggravated by drug-induced psychosis. They say schizophrenia is encoded into a person's DNA, the same way eye color and hair color are. They have books to show my father and articles to prove their points. They have drugs to control violent outbursts. They have drugs for everything. Prozac, Zocolac, Xanax, Hanalax. All Jim's medicines rhyme.

He doesn't even try to stand up now. He is accustomed to falling. Each of his medications has its purpose, one to stop his thoughts, one to level his mood, one to counter the depressive feeling of having no mood. Another to counter the one that lifts him.

When I come to visit, I ask Jim how he's doing.

He says “Fuck.” Then he says nothing for an hour.

As he sleeps, I watch his mouth move.

He won't see my mother at all.

*   *   *

Almost every day my mother calls me at Gate School with news of diagnoses, tests, meds.

“He's on lithium salts now and four others. If you wait,” she tells me, “I'll get you the names.”

She asks me what electroshock therapy entails. I tell her. She says, “No, no, they will not put those things all over my boy.”

And yet they do. Cables and plungers and electric currents. Trial and error. That's what they use. But nothing works.

“If he dies,” she says on my answering machine, “I'm going to go into the garage, put the door down…” I unplug the machine.

I visit my brother every week, but he doesn't look like my brother anymore. He is dry like a sea urchin shell, scooped out.

His face begins to bloat, lose its chin and cheekbones. His hair begins to fall out, his walk is slow and heavy.

When they move him to the lockdown ward, I try to make him laugh. I imitate Bugs Bunny and then Skeezer's weird whiny voice. Jim doesn't even smile. He looks through me, tells me to be careful of becoming a
harlot.
I don't understand how a surfer from Palos Verdes could come up with such words. Then I see the open book in his room. My brother is reading the Bible.

“If you look back,” he says, “you turn into salt.”

*   *   *