The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds. As it emerged again from sheepskin, Jack looked down at the pavement, cursed. He’d been walking around since ten, temperature even then close to ninety. The shadow stubs of the telephone poles and his own midget silhouette now suggested noon. He had no hat, and he’d left his sunglasses somewhere, either at Jamie’s or at The Wheel, or they might have slipped off his head. They did that sometimes, when he leaned down to tie his shoes or empty them of pebbles.
Pebbles?
Was that a word? He stopped to consider it, decided in the negative, and then marched on, flicking his thumb ceaselessly against his index like a Zippo. His nerves were shot, but unable to shut down. No off button now. He’d be zooming for hours, the crackle in his head exaggerated by the racket of birds rucked up in towers of palm, tossing the dry fronds. What were they doing? Ransacking sounds. Looking for nuts or dates, probably. Or bird sex. Possibly bird sex. Maybe he should walk to Rhonda’s, ask her to settle him. Or unsettle him. Maybe he wanted more. Share was what she should do, if she had any. He always shared with her. Not always, but it could be argued.
Rhonda was a crusher, though, a big girl, always climbing on top. Her heft was no joke, and Jack was a reed. Still, he loved her. Ha! That was the tweak coming on. He’d never admit to such a thing when he was flat. Now his immortal brain understood. He wanted to marry Rhonda, haul her up the steps of her double-wide, pump out about fifty kids. In the fly-eye of his mind he saw them, curled up like caterpillars on Rhonda’s bed.
Jack picked up the pace. The effect of his late-morning tokes was far from finished. Though he’d pulled nothing but dregs (the last of his stash), it was coming on strong, sparking his heart in unexpected ways.
So much gratitude. Jack made a fist and banged twice on his chest, thinking of Flaco, a school friend, now dead, who’d first turned him on to this stuff—a precious substance whose unadvertised charm was love. It was infuriating that no one ever mentioned this. The posters, the billboards, the P.S.A.s—all they talked about were skin lesions and rotten teeth. Kids, sadly, were not getting well-rounded information. If Jack hadn’t lost his phone, he’d point it at his face right now and make a documentary.
Traffic, a lot of it. On Speedway now, a strip-mall jungle, which, according to his mother, used to be lined with palm trees and old adobes, tamale peddlers and mom-and-pop shops. Not that Jack’s mother was nostalgic. She loved her Marts—the Dollar and the Quik and the Wal. “Cheaper, too,” she said. She liked to buy in bulk, always had extra. Maybe he should go to her place, instead of Rhonda’s, grab some granola bars, a few bottles of water for his pack. Sit on the old yellow couch under the swamp cooler, chew the fat. He hadn’t seen her in weeks.
Weeks?
Again, the word proved thin, suspect. “Mama,” he said, testing another—an utterance that stopped him in his tracks and caused his torso to jackknife forward. Laughed to spitting. He could picture her face, if he ever tried to call her that. She preferred Bertie. Only sixteen years his senior, she often reminded him. Bertie of the scorched hair, in her sparkle tops and toggle pants. “What’s it short for?” he once asked of her name. She’d told him that his grandfather was a humongous piece of shit, that’s what it was short for.
Of course, Jack had never met the famous piece of shit, had only heard stories. Supposedly he and Grandma Shit still lived in Tucson, might be anywhere, two of Jack’s neighbors. He might have passed them on the street, or lent them an egg or a cup of sugar.
Jack tittered into his fist. What eggs? What sugar? There was fuck-all in the fridge. In fact, depending on his location, there might not even be a fridge.
Buses roared past, their burning flanks throwing cannonballs of heat at the sidewalk. Jack turned away, moved toward himself, a murkier version trapped in the black glass façade of a large building. Twenty-two—he looked that plus ten. Of course, a witch’s mirror was no way to judge. The dark glass was spooked, not to be trusted. Hadn’t Jamie said, only yesterday, in the lamplit corner of the guest bedroom, that Jack looked all of sixteen? “Beautiful,” Jamie had whispered, touching Jack’s cheek.
Beautiful. Like something stitched on a pillow, sentimental crap from some other era. The lamplit whisperings had made Jack restless, the dissolved crystal blowing him sideways like a blizzard.
To hell with Jamie! Last week, after partying all night, Jack had woken up to find Jamie lying beside him, the man’s hand crawling like a snail across the crotch furrows of Jack’s jeans. Half dead, in deep crash, Jack hadn’t even been sure they were his jeans—the legs inside them looked too skinny, like a kid’s. He’d watched the snail-hand for a good five minutes, feeling nothing—and then, with a gush, he’d felt too much. When he leaped from the bed, Jamie screeched, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”—apologizing profusely, claiming he’d flailed in his sleep.
“Why are you in my bed at all?” Jack had asked, storming into the bathroom with shame-bitten fury. He’d got into the shower, only to find a bar of soap as thin and sharp as a razor blade—scraped himself clean as best he could, until he smelled breakfast coming on hot from the kitchen. It had turned out to be silver-dollar pancakes with whipped cream and chocolate chips. Jack’s favorite. Could the man stoop any lower?
Jamie just didn’t add up. A bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air. Wore pleated slacks, but without a belt you could sometimes glimpse thongs. Didn’t smoke, but blew invisible puffs for emphasis. And the name—Jamie—it sat uncomfortably on the fence, neutered, a child’s name, wrong for anyone over thirty, which Jamie clearly was. Plus he was fat, which made his body indecisive, intricately layered with loose slabs of flesh—potbelly and motherflaps. “Stay with me, why don’t you?” he’d said, for no discernible reason, at the Chevron rest-room sink, where Jack had been rinsing his clotted pipe.
That had been a week ago, maybe two. They’d been strangers in that rest room, the obese man appearing out of the gloom of a shit stall. His words, stay with me, had seemed, to the boy, vaguely futuristic, a beam of light from a spaceship.
Jack should have known better.
The sun drilled the boy’s head, looking for something. He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way to his belly, where the good stuff lived, where the miracle often happened: the black smoke reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel. He smiled at himself in the dark glass. It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing. Reflexively Jack scratched deep inside empty pockets, then licked his fingers. The bitch of it was this: forgiveness dissolved instantly on your tongue, there was no time to spit it out.
He’d have to remember to speak on this, when he made his documentary.
“Welcome to Presto’s!”
The blond girl stood just inside the black door, her face gaily frozen, as if cut from the pages of a yearbook. Jack comprehended none of her words.
“Welcome,” he replied, attempting a flawless imitation of her birdlike language. Jack was good with foreigners. Most of his school buds had been Chalupas.
The girl tilted her head; the smile wavered, but only briefly. Her mouth re-expanded with elastic lunacy.
“Ship or print?”
Jack was taken aback. Though it was true he needed to use the bathroom, he was disturbed by the girl’s lack of delicacy in regard to bodily functions.
“Number one,” he admitted quietly.
“Ship?” she persisted.
Jack felt dizzy. The girl’s teeth were very large and very white. Jack could only assume they were fake. Keeping his own dental wreckage tucked under blistered lips, he lifted his hands in a gesture of spiritual peace. “I’m just going to make a quick run to the rest room.”
“I’m sorry, they’re only for customers.”
“George Washington,” Jack blurted, still fascinated by the girl’s massive teeth.
“What’s that?”
“Cherry tree,” he continued associatively.
“Oh, like for the Fourth?” asked Blondie.
“Yes,” Jack replied kindly, even though he knew she was confusing Presidents. Fourth of July would be Jefferson or Adams. Jack had always been sweet on History. In school, when he was miniature, he’d got nothing but A’s. Again he sensed the expansiveness of his brain, a maze of rooms, many of which he’d never been in. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t finished high school, there was an Ivy League inside his head, libraries crammed with books. He just needed to pull them from between the folds of gray matter and read them. Close his eyes and get cracking. See, this was the other thing people never told you about meth. It was educational.
The girl informed him that there were no holiday specials, if that’s what he was asking about.
Jack nodded and smiled, tapping his head in pretense of understanding her logic. As he moved quickly toward the bathroom, the girl skittered off in another direction, also quickly.
Perhaps she had to print, too. Or take a ship.
Jack giggled, and opened a door leading to a storage closet.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” Jack said to the man inside the closet. “I understand what you’re saying.”
“What am I saying?” asked the man.
“Perfectly clear,” said Jack. He held up his peace-hands, walked back through the room of humming and spitting machines, and exited the building—behind which he quickly peed, before resuming his trek down Speedway.
As soon as he knocked at the trailer door, he was aware of the emptiness in his hands. He should have brought flowers. Or a burrito. He knocked again. Sweat dripped from under his arms, making him feel strangely cold.
“I have flowers,” he said to the door.
“Go away,” said the door.
“I’m not talking to a door,” said Jack. “I don’t take orders from doors.”
“You can’t be here. Why are you here?” The voice was exhausted, cakey. Jack could picture the pipe.
“Baby,” he said. “Come on. Why are you being stingy?”
“I’ll call the police, I swear to God.”
Jack was silent, but stood his ground. He scratched at the door like a cat. After a while, someone said, “Please.” The word sounded funny, like a flute. Jack tried saying it again. Even worse. It almost sounded as if he were going to cry.
When the door opened, it did so only a few inches—most of Rhonda’s mouth obscured by a chain.
“You cannot be here, Jack.”
Jack, who was clearly there, only smiled.
“I’m O.K.,” he assured her.
“You look like shit,” said Rhonda.
“Sunburn,” theorized Jack. “It’s like a hundred and twenty out here.” He could barely see the girl—or he could see her, just not recognize her. She seemed different, her hair and her clothes fussed up, neat. He smelled no smoke, only perfume. “What’s going on?” he asked, flicking his thumb.
Rhonda made an irritated snort, half laugh, half fart. It seemed to come from her mouth.
Jack, confident he was at the peak of his charm, refused to be put off. “Can you just open the door, so that we can talk like humans, without the frickin’ mustache?”
“The what?”
“The . . . ” Jack gestured swoopily toward the door. “The frickin’ . . . ”
“Chain?” suggested Rhonda.
“All I want is, like, hello, O.K.? Like hello, whatever, a glass of water.”
The girl grimaced dramatically, egging on Jack’s own sense of tragedy.
“I am literally dying, Rhonda.”
Jack pressed his face into the door crack, letting the cool air caress his skin. His eyes, blinded from sunlight, barely took in the fact that the girl was gone. After a moment, he heard water running in the sink, the clink of a glass being pulled from a cupboard. He closed his eyes, felt a stirring between his legs. Rhonda had always been so kind.
“I don’t need ice,” he called out.
“Good. Here you go.”
At first Jack wasn’t sure what it was. The water thrown in his face was cold. It dripped down his neck and into his shirt, slow trails across his belly. It lingered, drifted lower, like a kind of kiss. Jack licked his lips: the tap water salty, mixed with his sweat. Something was humming, too—the bones under his cheeks, near his eyes, vibrating like a tuning fork or an organ at the back of a church.
“Don’t cry,” he said to Rhonda, who said she wasn’t.
“Why would I be crying after a fucking year?”
Jack said, “What year?”—to which Rhonda replied, “I thought you were dead.”
She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. Jack asked if she was going fast.
“Are you insane?” said Rhonda. “Those were the worst two months of my life.”
“Why don’t I come in and we’ll take a nap?” suggested Jack.
“Listen to me,” the girl said. “You have to lose this address—do you hear me?”
Jack ran a hand over his wet face.
“Please,” begged Rhonda. “You have to go. Eric will be home soon.”
Jack wondered if she meant Jack, since the names were so similar. “Do you mean me?” he asked in earnest. He tried to find the girl’s eyes—and when he did he saw that she wasn’t a girl at all. She was old, practically as old as Bertie. What was more astonishing, though, was the look on her face. There was no love in it whatsoever.
“I don’t know you,” said Jack.
“Good,” said Rhonda, shutting the door.
He stood on some gravel, and felt terrible. Even the little plank of shadow beside the cement wall held no appeal. Were he to lie there, he’d only get the jits.
Walking was what he needed, and to hell with the sun.
That’s what people in his position did. They walked, they moved, they got things done. Sitting was no good. Talking was fine, if you had someone. Sex was primal. Jack’s body knew the rules. There were any number of ways to keep one’s brain from exploding.
People going fast rearranged the furniture, or crawled around looking for carpet crumbs. Anything that used your hands, which, compelled by the imaginative fervor of your mind, became tools in a breathless campaign to change the shape of the world. It was art, essentially. Jack wondered why more people going fast didn’t do crafts. He suddenly wished for construction paper and Elmer’s glue; glitter, cotton, clay. Once, when he was little, he’d made a kick-ass giraffe from a walnut and some toilet-paper tubes. The legs, ingeniously, had been chopsticks.
Bertie used to leave them for hours, on the days she attended her meetings. She’d always made sure there were coloring books and Play-Doh, carrot sticks and DVDs. Little notes saying Love and Be back soon. Jack and his sister had in no way been deprived.
His sister? Fuck. His sister. She came back to him like sheet lightning. He hadn’t seen Lisa since she’d gone away. He clapped his hands, to banish the thought. It was almost funny how, at certain elevations, it was so easy to pretend you didn’t know things you could never forget. Jack dug for his phone, to see if he had Lisa’s number.
But, being that there was no phone, he pulled up only lint—which he quickly dismissed, into the air, with a puff. He watched it float for a moment, fluttering with indecision, before it drifted down, in a slow sashay, and landed on his shoe.
“Fine,” said Jack. “Fine!” He picked up the gray fluff, and stuffed it back in his pocket.
Walked around the block to see if he could trick it. He’d done it before. Pull one over on time. Circle back and confuse it. Like one of those Aborigines. They were big walkers, too. Ugly fuckers, but the cool thing was they could walk a thousand miles, no problem—and they weren’t trying to get to China or some shit like that. What they wanted was to get back to their ancestors—way the fuck past Grandma and Grandpa, all the way back to the lizards and the snakes.
Jack, of course, would have been satisfied with a smaller victory—finding his way back five, six years, to Bertie’s crumbling adobe. “Star Trek” and pizza with Lisa. Hell, he’d be fine with getting back to just last year, to the old Rhonda, the Rhonda of the bra-welted back and the cream-cheese thighs, the sad girl he’d met at The Wheel, and whom he’d made happy with snowflakes and black clouds.
Had it really been a year? Jack felt nervous now, flicked his thumb even faster, sensed his shadow growing longer, trailing him like gum stuck to his shoe. Soon, he knew, the freak would come, the soul-suck, if he didn’t get one of two things: more crystal or a sound sleep—both of which would require money, because sleep, at this point, wouldn’t be free. It would cost a bottle of grain or a six-pack or a pill. Sometimes he wondered why a person couldn’t just hit himself over the head with a rock.
He climbed on top of the gas meter and opened the window, as he’d done a million times before. A small, high window, facing the alley. Lisa’s window, which Bertie never locked.
A tight fit, even for a skinny drink like Jack. Halfway through, he found himself stuck, but with a series of wriggling bitch-in-heat motions he managed to make it through, head first, onto the dusty shrine of his sister’s neatly made bed. The friction of passing through the small opening, though, had pulled down his pants, as well as given him an erection. When he stood to hoist his jeans, a young woman in yoga tights entered the room, dropped a pear, and screamed.
Jack, thinking the pear was some sort of grenade, covered his head, leaving his erection exposed.
The woman moved quickly to the bureau and grabbed a bead-encrusted candlestick that Lisa had made in sixth grade. Jack, watching the drama through smoke-scented fingers, calmed, seeing the familiar prop. Plus, the grenade, bearing teeth marks, was obviously a ruse.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” said Jack—a comment that, judging by the woman’s anguished face, failed to impart the cordiality he wished to convey. The woman squealed and fled the room.
“I just want to see Bertie,” Jack called out, pulling up his pants. “I’m her son. I’m Jack.”
The idea of having to explain his existence exhausted him. When he walked into the living room, the woman was still clutching the candlestick—a lathe-turned beauty, to which Lisa had glued hundreds of tiny red beads. Jack had lent her the epoxy himself, a leftover tube from one of his build-it-yourself dinosaur sets.
“You can put that down,” said Jack.
“Look,” said the woman, “Beatrice isn’t here. She won’t be back for a while.”
“Who?”
“You’re looking for your mother?”
Jack felt a peculiar flutter in his gut.
“I’m meeting her in a—in a bit,” stammered the woman. “I’ll just—I’ll let her know you were here.”
“What did you call her?” asked Jack.
The woman took a step back. “Nothing. What?”
“Her name,” Jack stated as calmly as possible, “is Bertie.”
“Well, that’s not how I know her,” said the woman in yoga tights, who, even with the upraised candlestick, seemed to smile, a quick flash of arrogance.
“I can see your vulva,” said Jack.
The woman covered her crotch with the candlestick. “My God, do you even know what you’re saying?”
“It’s inappropriate is all I’m saying,” replied Jack, strolling over to the yellow couch. He sat at the far right, where the air of the swamp cooler always hit you square in the face. As kids, he and Lisa used to fight over this spot. “Fifteen minutes each,” Bertie used to say, making them share the luxury equally. “Otherwise I’ll shut the damn thing off.” Frickin’ Solomon, that was his mother all right. A part-time Christian with a gutter mouth.
Beatrice? For fucking real? How could Jack not have known this—or, more important, why had this information been kept from him? “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” he said to the woman.
But she wasn’t listening. She was on the telephone, giving an address Jack recognized. He made a blah-blah-blah gesture with his hand, as the woman prattled into the phone.
Why did no one wish to have a legitimate exchange with him? He was a good person, a personable person, a person with a heart the size of a fucking bullfrog. Couldn’t the woman in yoga tights understand that there was no need to involve the police?
“I live here,” said Jack.
The woman said, “Thank you,” and hung up the phone. “I’ve called the—”
“I know,” interrupted Jack. He crossed his legs, willing himself to stay calm. Anyway, it would take them at least ten minutes to get here. This wasn’t a Zip Code anyone rushed to, especially the cops.
“Do you want to get arrested?” the woman asked. “I mean, do you want to be like this?”
“Like what?” asked Jack.
“Do you realize how much pain you’ve caused Beatrice?”
“Who are you, exactly?” Jack had the thought to have Yoga Tights arrested when the police arrived. “How do you even know my mother?”
“We’re _room_mates,” the woman articulated with unnecessary aggression.
Jack had a vision of pillow fights, s’mores, backrubs.
“Disgusting,” he said.
“What’s disgusting?”
Jack didn’t reply—glass houses and all. He might as well be talking about himself and Jamie. He stood, annoyed, and walked over to the mirrored cabinet in the corner of the room. It seemed distinctly smaller than it had when he was little, like a toy version of the real thing. He knelt before it, turned the silver latch, opened the doors. He stared inside, uncomprehendingly (What the fuck?), pushed around envelopes and stamps, a pile of old phone bills. He shoved his hands to the far back. Not even a bottle of Tio Pepe or crème de menthe.
“We don’t keep any in the house,” the woman said.
Jack scowled. He knew Bertie better than that.
“In case you care to know, your mother is doing really well.”
Wonderful! thought Jack. Applause!
He stood, dusted himself off regally, as if he might dismiss the increeping panic. “I just need to get a few bottles of water.”
In the kitchen, in the pantry, he pulled the cord, turned on the light. Well stocked, as usual. For Judgment Day, Bertie had always been prepared. With food, if not with mercy. “I can’t be held responsible,” Bertie liked to say. In a more generous mood, everything was God’s plan, God’s doing. Jack took six bottles of water and ten granola bars, stuffed them into his pack.
“Help yourself, why don’t you?” the woman said.
Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Jack turned to her. She was standing in the doorway, still holding the candlestick.
“Do you even know who that belongs to? Do you even know who made that?”
But the woman had no interest in discussing the relics of Jack’s childhood. “Just take what you want and go,” she said. “Beatrice would probably be pissed anyway, if I got you arrested. I don’t know why she should be, though. You’ve been a very toxic influence on her.” She shook her head, puffing air bullishly from her nose. “Everyone at Fellowship thinks so, too, but your mother is, like, deluded.”
The woman moved the candlestick from one hand to the other. Jack looked at her hard, just to make sure she wasn’t Lisa. No one really knew what Lisa looked like these days.
You could always tell by the eyes, though—and when Jack looked at those he knew that Yoga Tights was not his sister.
“You’re not even a very good replacement,” he said.
“Replacement for what?” she asked.
But Jack did not deign to answer. He zipped his pack and, without even bothering to take the loose change visible on the counter, scurried out the back door.
He cut through neighbors’ yards to avoid running into the cops. He leaped over stones, over crevices, over brown lawns and tiny quicksilver lizards. His speed exhilarated him, and then made him feel distinctly ill. When he finally heard the sirens, he was three blocks away, in an alley frilly with trash. He lurched to a stop, sending up clouds of dust. A dry wind blew grit into his eye.
Fuck. He needed an improvement in his itinerary, like immediately. But he had no leverage. Not even two bucks for the bus. He should have taken the coins from Bertie’s kitchen. Probably no more than a dollar, but a dollar was enough to get started. Four quarters in a newspaper lockbox and you could steal the lot, sell them from some busy intersection. Old-school, but it worked—even if, sometimes, it took five hours to make five bucks.
“What’s that?” Jack said to his stomach, which was mumbling something vague but insistent. He fed it a granola bar, and immediately vomited. Drank some water. Vomited again.
Dirt, weeds, a huge prickly pear like a coral reef. Jack covered his burning head with his T-shirt, exposing his belly. Why hadn’t the Founding Fathers planted more shade trees out here? Probably because the bastards had never made it this far west. The only people who’d ventured this far, back then, were derelicts and thieves. Uprooted types, not prone to plant things.
Jack was leaning philosophically against a fence for several minutes before he spotted the dog, sleeping on the other side. Not a pit, just some big floppy collie. Still, it reminded him of Lisa.
How could an animal sleep in this heat with all that fur? Jack knelt in the alley, winding his fingers through the chain-link. “Psst.” Rattled the fence. “Hey! Buster!”
The dog opened one eye, too stunned to get up. Shook a leg epileptically.
“You’re just gonna lie there?” Piles of dried shit everywhere, like a miniature wigwam village. Again Jack rattled the fence.
“What are you doing? Why are you bothering him?” A little man with a lopsided beard, like a paintbrush that had dried crooked, appeared at a window.
“I’m not bothering him,” said Jack. “I thought he was someone else.”
“He’s a dog,” said the man. “He ain’t got nothing to do with you.”
Jack, riled, was ready to argue the point, but then let it go. He could see that the man was old, and so was the dog. Besides, his mouth was dry, and as he tried to get up his legs buckled.
The man snapped his fingers in Jack’s direction. “No funny business!”
Jack nodded and backed away. “I’m going.”
He walked about ten feet before he stopped, opened his backpack, and pulled out another granola bar—which he quickly unwrapped and tossed over the fence. “Get up for that, I bet.”
The dog didn’t hesitate. “I thought so,” said Jack.
Instantly, though, the old man shot from the back door and pulled the food from the dog’s mouth.
“It’s not poison!” shouted Jack. “It’s granola!”
A firecracker went off in the distance, and Jack turned. Next time, he thought, I’ll do that—stick a firecracker in the damn granola.
For years, he’d hated every dog, and experienced a paralyzing weakness in their presence. Now, despite the occasional flash of cruel intention, Jack’s anger had mostly turned into something else. A dog, any dog, was like the relentless sunshine: mind-alteringly sad. Jack sat on the curb, touched his hand to blazing macadam.
Sometimes it could be burned out of you—the pain.
But no, the past was here, before him now like a mirage, wavering with tiny figures, holograms he recognized.
Resistance is futile, the Borg say.
Because not only had he run into a dog; he’d run out of his stash as well—and running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life. No dusting of white snow to prettify the view. With a mad, flea-scratching intensity, Jack scraped out the stem of his pookie, but what fell from it was worthless: a few flakes of irredeemable tar. The holograms grew to full size, and came closer.
“Grrr,” said Jack, hoping he didn’t sound like an animal.
Jack had been with his sister that day—a summer morning, playing Frisbee in a field. The Frisbee had gone over a fence.
The dog was black, not huge, the size of a twenty-gallon ice chest.
After the attack, Jack wondered if they’d really killed it. The police had used the words put to sleep, but Jack had worried that the owners might have somehow woken the animal up, and were hiding it inside their house. Lisa’s fears, no doubt, had been far worse—but Jack had known better than to ask her.
Anyway, Lisa couldn’t really talk after it happened. She had a lot of problems with her jaw. With everything, really. Her right hand was so nerve-damaged that she had to use her left, which she never got very good at. She shook a lot, refused to eat, mostly drank smoothies. Her pinkie was missing.
Her face, though, was the worst. Even after two surgeries, it looked like something badly made, lumpy—as if a child had made it out of clay. It was less a face than the idea of one, preliminary, a sketch—but careless, with terrible proportions, and slightly skewed; primitive—a face that might be touching in art, but in life was hideous.
“Look at that!” Bertie had shouted at the lawyer, showing him pictures of what Lisa had looked like before. “Beautiful. And this is what they’re saying she’s worth?”
The settlement had not been much. “An outrage,” Bertie said to anyone who would listen. She tried to get another lawyer to take on the case. Jack would sit with his mother in cluttered offices, staring at the floor, telling the suits what he’d seen. “Happens every seven seconds,” one lawyer said with disturbing enthusiasm, as if discussing the odds of winning the lottery. “Plus, you know how people in Tucson love their Rotts and their pits.” Unfortunately, he explained, a jackpot settlement was usually tied to an attack catching the right wave of publicity. “Your moment has probably passed,” he said with a wince, a shrug.
“That baby,” Bertie would complain, referring to what she considered Lisa’s competition.
The same summer, a two-year-old had been mauled near Sabino Canyon. There’d been a fund-raising campaign. “Foothills,” Bertie had scoffed, after seeing the child’s parents on television, their big house on a ridge. “As if they need help! We should start our own campaign,” she’d muttered, after a sip, to Jack.
“We could make posters,” he’d suggested sheepishly.
“Posters, TV commercials, the whole shebang.” His mother pulled more deeply from her Captain Morgan mug, the ice clinking like money inside a piggy bank.
“Wanna make them pop, though,” she said of the posters. “Need to get us some big-ass pieces of paper.”
It would have been easy. Jack was artistic (everyone said so), and Bertie had balls. But, in the end, they’d never done a thing; never called a TV station or decorated a coffee can with ribbons and a picture of Lisa’s face. Never took the case back to court—even though it was clear, after the initial surgeries, that Lisa would require more. The procedures couldn’t be rushed, though. The doctor had recommended that Lisa wait before going back under the knife: “Too much trauma already. Let’s see how the current work heals.”
What little remained of the settlement money was kept in a separate account, like a vacation fund or a Christmas club, some perverse dowry. Money for the future, earmarked for surgery.
Jack had helped, at some point, hadn’t he? Standing at the edge of the alley, he scratched his leg—a vague recollection that he’d given Lisa some of his own skin. It had been more compatible than Bertie’s.
In the fall, Lisa had refused to go back to school for her junior year. She mostly stayed inside, in her bedroom. There was a lot of pain medication—which was apparently, Jack learned, something to be shared. “I’m in pain, too,” Bertie had cried, defensively, when he caught her one night with the bottle. “Anyway,” she chided, changing the subject, “your sister can’t live in a fog for the rest of her life. She needs to get a job.”
Jack didn’t understand why a person in Lisa’s position couldn’t be allowed to stay inside, in a dark bedroom, for the rest of her life. Bertie had a thing, though, about self-improvement and positive thinking, which often made her children shrink from her as if she were a terrorist.
Amazingly, Lisa had found a job fairly quickly, full time at a telemarketing firm. “You see,” Bertie had chirped. “Up and at ’em,” practically shoving Lisa out the door, her hair strategically feathered over her cheeks. “Minimum wage,” Lisa said, and Bertie replied that there was no shame in that. All day, Lisa had sat in a cubicle, talked on the phone in her new, funny voice. But maybe, thought Jack, the people his sister called just assumed she had a toothache, or an accent.
No one on the phone would have known that his sister was a high-school dropout in Tucson—or that she’d been mutilated. That was a word no one had used—not the doctors or Lisa’s friends or even the truth-obsessed women from Bertie’s so-called church. No one ever said maimed, destroyed, ruined.
Bitten, people preferred to say, modestly, as if Lisa’s misfortune had been the work of an ant, or a fly.
Jack rubbed his eye, swatted his cheek. As he headed downtown in long, loping strides, his body was dangerously taut, a telephone wire stretched between time zones. He needed to bring his thinking back to 2000-whatever-the-fuck-it-was—this day, this street. “Excuse me,” he said to a woman with a briefcase and praying-mantis sunglasses—but, before he could explain his purpose, she darted away and leaped into a black sedan. The woman obviously had issues; even from inside the vehicle, she was waving her hands at him in extreme sign language: no tengo no tengo no tengo.
After an hour and a half, he’d managed to assemble two dollars (a few quarters from a laundromat, a few obtained by outright begging). When he climbed on the bus and dropped the coins in the chute, they made a sound like a slot machine promising a payout.
“What are you waiting for?” asked the driver.
“Nothing,” mumbled Jack, taking a seat at the back.
He’d been looking forward to the air-conditioning, but now it made him shake—the cold air, like pins on his face. Sometimes he’d met Lisa after her shift, to accompany her home. She hadn’t liked to take the bus alone. She’d wanted Jack to ride with her in the mornings as well—but how could he? He was fifteen; he had school.
Anyway, the afternoons were enough. The walk to the back of the bus had always seemed to take a lifetime. People stared, kids laughed. Lisa never said anything, but sometimes she took Jack’s hand, which embarrassed him: what if people thought she was his girlfriend? Sometimes he could hear her breathing; sometimes, a sound in her throat like twigs snapping.
That same year, Jack met Flaco. The first time they went fast together, in Flaco’s enamel-black bedroom, it was like, oh yes—total understanding, total big picture, all the nagging little details washed away. Soon Jack stopped meeting Lisa after work. He let her take the bus alone, with nothing but her feathered hair to protect her; her head drooping like a dead flower; a white glove on her right hand like Michael Jackson, the pinkie stuffed with cotton.
It was O.K., though. Because the funny thing was, he’d been able to love her more, and with less effort, from a distance. He felt that by going fast he was actually helping Lisa, he was helping all of them. He was building a white city out of crystal, inside his heart. When it was finished, there’d be room for everyone. For the first time in his life Jack had understood Bertie’s nonsense about positive thinking, about taking responsibility for your own life. After Jack met Flaco, there were nights he didn’t come home at all. Sometimes their flights lasted for days. Bertie might have complained, but she, too, was spending more and more time at her meetings. It was no surprise when Lisa said she was going away.
“Away? Where could you possibly go?” cried Bertie.
Lisa said she’d heard there was a good doctor in Phoenix; she’d start there.
“For how long?” Bertie had asked—and, when Lisa didn’t answer—“And I suppose you plan on taking the money with you?”
“It is mine,” said Lisa.
No one could argue with that.
Jack pulled the cord, made his way to the rear exit of the bus. The door opened with a life-support hiss.
Whiplash of light coming off a skyscraper. Jack held up his hand to block the sun’s reflection, a roundish blur of ghostly ectoplasm that hovered somewhere around the twentieth floor—which the boy’s street sense interpreted, correctly, as roughly five o’clock.
Please be over soon, he thought, knowing full well that the day would linger for hours yet. Even after sunset, the heat would be terrible—the sidewalks, the streets, the buildings, radiating back the fire they’d absorbed all day. There’d be no relief until well after midnight.
Jack walked south, toward the barrio, toward the sound of firecrackers, the whistle of bottle rockets. Later, at dark, the neon pompoms would come—the big holiday displays at the foothills resorts, and the city-sponsored show on Sentinel Peak, which half the time had to be stopped due to the scrub catching on fire. From the valley, you could watch the flames flowing down the mountain like lava. People looked forward to that as much as to the fireworks.
Jack walked with no particular purpose, and was surprised when he found himself standing before Flaco’s house. There was the white storybook fence around the neatly swept yard; the saint with her garland of artificial flowers, standing on a lake of tinfoil. At the Virgin’s feet, a weird mix of things: playing cards and plastic beads, and what looked like pieces of old bread. Jack had always loved this diorama, which lived inside a little cage like a chicken coop. To protect it from the rain, Flaco’s mother had explained.
He wondered if she’d still recognize him, maybe give him some carne seca wrapped in a tortilla as thin as tissue paper. In so many ways, his life had started in this house. A thousand hopes and dreams. Jack wondered if they were still in there, inside Flaco’s spray-painted bedroom. Wondered, too, if there might be any crystal left in one of the old hiding spots.
Five years was a long time, though. Someone would already have smoked it, or flushed it down the drain. And, besides, Jack didn’t have the stamina to crawl through another window. He was done with windows and doors. He half considered climbing inside the chicken coop with the saint.
The sadness bloomed in his belly. It always started there—a radioactive flower, chaotic, spinning out in weird fractals until it found its way to his arms and legs, his quivering lips. Then the telltale buzz of electricity in his hair.
See, this was the reason it was better to go fast with another person—so that, when you crashed, you weren’t alone. The high, too, was better when shared. Sometimes he and Flaco, as a team, could increase the effect of the drugs, pinballing around the bedroom, generating so much heat they could barely stand the feel of their clothing. Often they’d ripped off their shirts, lain next to each other on the bed, watched in amazement as their words turned into flames, rose into the air like rockets.
Flaco—and this was something Jack wished to mention in his documentary—Flaco had not died from crystal. It had been something else, something stupid, a car.
Walking away from the imprisoned saint, Jack passed old women putting lawn chairs along the street, claiming spots. Brujas in flowered smocks and slappy flip-flops, some with brooms, territorial. Later, they’d sit there with glasses of watermelon juice and watch the fireworks, the burning mountain.
Farther south now, past Birrieria Guadalajara, where he and Flaco used to eat everything, even tongue.
Lengua.
Words no longer seemed chimeric to Jack, no longer seemed approximations for something else. They were earthbound now, which was what happened when you were sober. Jack clenched his fists—untrimmed nails digging into his flesh. All he wanted was to find a safe place before the blooms made a mess of the sky.
He stopped at the railroad tracks. Stopped right between the iron rails, kicked aside some trash, and sat. In his dark jeans, his dirt-brown shirt, they might not even see him. “Ow,” he said, because of the stones as he lay down.
While the sun cooked him, he became aware of how dirty he was. He could smell himself, even a slight tang of shit. Disgusting. His breath stank—and his stomach was bubbling, an ungodly flatulence from a diet of protein bars and black smoke. It was understandable why others would despise him. Most people lived their entire lives straight, and had no ability whatsoever to see through surfaces—unlike Jack, who’d been schooled in crystal, and who understood how easy it was to forgive.
Who knew if Lisa forgave him? He hoped she didn’t. He was the one who’d thrown the Frisbee over the fence, a total spaz, missing Lisa by a mile. She’d pulled a face and told him to go get it. “You’re closer,” he’d shouted back. “You get it.”
Jack turned his head, to see if he could spot the train. Flicker of distant traffic: metal and glass. Lost saguaros, catatonic, above which birds drifted in slow circles, like pieces of ash. To the east, the mountains, shrouded in dust, were all but invisible. The train would come eventually, the crazy quilt of boxcars, the fractious whistle.
Oh, but it was so boring waiting for death! Jack had come to the tracks before. When the signal light began to flash, he jumped up. He wasn’t an idiot.
Besides, he couldn’t help himself; his sadness was like a river, carrying him home.
“You don’t like your life, make up another one.” Something Bertie used to say. Her children had, in the end, listened to her.
Jack kept running, and when he got to Jamie’s he didn’t knock; he walked right in, sat at the table.
It wasn’t long before Jamie came into the kitchen in his phony orange kimono (“Mijo! Mijo!”), flapping his arms, flushing, like something out of a Mexican soap opera.
And though Jack didn’t laugh, he remembered the part of himself that had—and not so long ago. Still, he flinched when the man tried to touch his face.
In the silence that followed, Jamie began to smile.
“What?” said Jack—and Jamie said, “I’m just looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Do I need a reason?”
Jack shrugged, evasive. “I’m sort of hungry.”
“Well,” Jamie said grandly, “you’re dealing with an expert on that subject. The only question is: animal, vegetable, or mineral?” This last word sugarcoated, singsong.
Jack looked up, hopefully.
“Yes, mijo.” Jamie patted the pocket of his kimono. “I do I do I do.”
“I do,” repeated Jack, feeling his heart leap straight into the man’s fat little hand. ♦
