Wild Child and Other Stories

  Her father had held her hand on the way in and he sat beside her on one of the wooden benches as his attorney went over the details of that day after school, because he wanted to make sure they were all on the same page. Those were his words exactly—“I want to make sure we’re all on the same page on this”—as he loomed over her and her father, bracing himself on the gleaming wooden rail, his shoes competing with the floor for the brilliance of their shine, and she couldn’t help picturing some Mexican boy, some dropout from the high school, laboring over those shoes while Mr. Apodaca sat high in a leatherbacked chair, his feet in the stainless steel stirrups. She pictured him behind his newspaper, looking stern, or going over his brief, the details, these details. When he was through, when he’d gone through everything, minute by minute, gesture by gesture, coaching her, quizzing her—“And what did he say? What did you say?”—he asked her father if he could have a minute alone with her.

  That was when her father gave her hand a final squeeze and then dropped it and got up from the bench. He was wearing a new suit, a navy so dark and severe it made his skin look like raw dough, and he’d had his hair cut so tight round the ears it was as if a machine had been at work there, an edger or a riding mower like the one they used on the soccer field at school, only in miniature, and for an instant she imagined it, tiny people like in Gulliver’s Travels, buzzing round her father’s ears with their mowers and clippers and edgers. The tie he was wearing was the most boring one he owned, a blue fading to black, with no design, not even a stripe. His face was heavy, his crow’s-feet right there for all the world to see—gouges, tears, slits, a butcher’s shop of carved and abused skin—and for the first time she noticed the small gray dollop of loose flesh under his chin. It made him look old, worn-out, past his prime, as if he weren’t the hero anymore but playing the hero’s best friend, the one who never gets the girl and never gets the job. And what role was she playing? The star. She was the star here, and the more the attorney talked on and the heavier her father’s face got, the more it came home to her.

  Mr. Apodaca said nothing, just let the silence hang in the room till the memory of her father’s footsteps had faded. Then he leaned over the back of the bench directly in front of her, the great seal of the State of California framed over the dais behind him, and he squeezed his eyes shut a moment so that when he opened them and fixed her with his gaze, there were tears there. Or the appearance of tears. His eyelashes were moist and the moistness picked each of them out individually until all she could think of was the stalks of cane against the fence in the back corner of the yard. “I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, Angelle,” he breathed, his voice so soft and constricted it was like the sound of the air being let out of a tire. “Because this concerns you and your sister. It could affect your whole life.”

  Another pause. Her stomach was crawling. She didn’t want to say anything but he held the pause so long she had to bow her head and say, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

  And then suddenly, without warning, his voice was lashing out at her: “But you don’t know it. Do you know what’s at stake here? Do you really? ”

  “No,” she said, and it was a whisper.

  “Your father is going to plead no contest to the charge of driving under the influence. He was wrong, he admits it. And they’ll take away his driving privileges and he’ll have to go to counseling and find someone to drive you and your sister to school, and I don’t mean to minimize that, that’s very serious, but here’s the thing you may not know.” He held her eyes, though she wanted to look away. “The second charge is child endangerment, not for the boy on the bike, who barely even scraped a knee, luckily, luckily, and whose parents have already agreed to a settlement, but for you, for allowing you to do what you did. And do you know what will happen if the jury finds him guilty on that charge?”

  She didn’t know what was coming, not exactly, but the tone of what he was conveying—dark, ominous, fulminating with anger and the threat about to be revealed in the very next breath—made her feel small. And scared. Definitely scared. She shook her head.

  “They’ll take you and Lisette away from him.” He clenched both hands, pushed himself up from the rail and turned as if to pace off down the aisle in front of her, as if he was disgusted with the whole thing and had no more to say. But then, suddenly, he swung round on her with a furious twist of his shoulders and a hard accusatory stab of his balled-up right hand and a single rigid forefinger. “And no,” he said, barely contained, barely able to keep his voice level, “in answer to your unasked question or objection or whatever you want to call it, your mother’s not coming back for you, not now, maybe not ever.”

  Was he ashamed? Was he humiliated? Did he have to stop drinking and get his life in order? Yes, yes and yes. But as he sat there in the courtroom beside Jerry Apodaca at eleven-thirty in the morning, the high arched windows pregnant with light and his daughter, Marcy, Dolores and the solemn-faced au pair sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the gleaming wooden bench behind him, there was a flask in his inside pocket and the faint burning pulse of single-malt scotch rode his veins. He’d taken a pull from it in the men’s room not ten minutes ago, just to steady himself, and then he’d rinsed out his mouth and ground half a dozen Tic Tacs between his teeth to knock down any trace of alcohol on his breath. Jerry would have been furious with him if he so much as suspected . . . and it was a weak and cowardly thing to do, no excuse, no excuse at all, but he felt adrift, felt scared, and he needed an anchor to hold on to. Just for now. Just for today. And then he’d throw the thing away, because what was a flask for anyway except to provide a twenty-four-hour teat for the kind of drunk who wore a suit and brushed his teeth.

  He began to jiggle one foot and tap his knees together beneath the table, a nervous twitch no amount of scotch would cure. The judge was taking his time, the assistant D.A. smirking over a sheaf of papers at her own table off to the right. She wore a permanent self-congratulatory look, this woman, as if she were queen of the court and the county too, and she’d really laid into him before the recess, and that was nasty, purely nasty. She was the prosecution’s attack dog, that was what Jerry called her, her voice tuned to a perpetual note of sarcasm, disbelief and petulance, but he held to his story and never wavered. He was just glad Angelle hadn’t had to see it.

  She was here now, though, sitting right behind him, missing school—missing school because of him. And that was one more strike against him, he supposed, because what kind of father would . . . ?—but the thought was too depressing and he let it die. He resisted the urge to turn round and give her a look, a smile, a wink, the least gesture, anything. It was too painful to see her there, under constraint, his daughter dragged out of school for this, and then he didn’t want anybody to think he was coaching her or coercing her in any way. Jerry had no such scruples, though. He’d drilled her over and over and he’d even gone to the extreme of asking her—or no, instructing her—to wear something that might conform to the court’s idea of what a good, honest, straightforward child was like, something that would make her look younger than she was, too young to bend the truth and far too young even to think about getting behind the wheel of a car.

  Three times Jerry had sent her back to change outfits until finally, with a little persuasion from the au pair (Allie, and he’d have to remember to slip her a twenty, a twenty at least, because she was gold, pure gold), she put on a lacy white high-collared dress she’d worn for some kind of pageant at school, with matching white tights and patent-leather shoes. There was something wrong there in the living room, he could see that, something in the way she held her shoulders and stamped up the stairs to her room, her face clenched and her eyes burning into him, and he should have recognized it, should have given her just a hair more of his attention, but Marcy was there and she had her opinion and Jerry was being an autocrat and he himself had his hands full—he couldn’t eat or think or do anything other than maybe slip into the pantry and tip the bottle of
Macallan over the flask. By the time he thought of it, they were in the car, and he tried, he did, leaning across the seat to ply her with little jokes about getting a free day off and what her teachers were going to think and what Aaron Burr might have done—he would’ve just shot somebody, right?—but Jerry was drilling her one last time and she was sunk into the seat beside Marcy, already clamped up.

  The courtroom, this courtroom, the one she was in now, was a duplicate of the one in which her father’s attorney had quizzed her an hour and a half ago, except that it was filled with people. They were all old, or older, anyway, except for one woman in a formfitting plaid jacket Angelle had seen in the window at Nordstrom who must have been in her twenties. She was in the jury box, looking bored. The other jurors were mostly men, businessmen, she supposed, with balding heads and recessed eyes and big meaty hands clasped in their laps or grasping the rail in front of them. One of them looked like the principal of her school, Dr. Damon, but he wasn’t.

  The judge sat up at his desk in the front of the room, which they called a bench but wasn’t a bench at all, the flag of the State of California on one side of him and the American flag on the other. She was seated in the front row, between Dolores and Allie, and her father and Mr. Apodaca sat at a desk in front of her, the shoulders of their suits puffed up as if they were wearing football pads. Her father’s suit was so dark she could see the dandruff there, a little spray of it like dust on the collar of his jacket, and she felt embarrassed for him. And sorry for him, sorry for him too—and for herself. And Lisette. She looked up at the judge and then the district attorney with his grim gray tight-shaven face and the scowling woman beside him, and couldn’t help thinking about what Mr. Apodaca had told her, and it made her shrink into herself when Mr. Apodaca called her name and the judge, reading the look on her face, tried to give her a smile of encouragement.

  She wasn’t aware of walking across the floor or of the hush that fell over the courtroom or even the bailiff who asked her to hold up her right hand and swear to tell the truth—all this, as if she were recalling a fragmented dream, would come to her later. But then she was seated in the witness chair and everything was bright and loud suddenly, as if she’d just switched channels on the TV. Mr. Apodaca was right there before her, his voice rising sweetly, almost as if he were singing, and he was leading her through the questions they’d rehearsed over and over again. Yes, she told him, her father was late, and yes, it was getting dark, and no, she didn’t notice anything strange about him. He was her father and he always picked her sister and her up on Wednesdays, she volunteered, because Wednesdays were when Allie and Dolores both had their day off and there was no one else to do it because her mother was in France.

  They were all watching her now, the court gone absolutely silent, so silent you would have thought everyone had tiptoed out the door, but there they all were, hanging on her every word. She wanted to say more about her mother, about how her mother was coming home soon—had promised as much the last time she’d called long distance from her apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés—but Mr. Apodaca wouldn’t let her. He kept leading her along, using his sugary voice now, talking down to her, and she wanted to speak up and tell him he didn’t have to treat her like that, tell him about her mother, Lisette, the school and the lawn and the trees and the way the interior of the car smelled and the heat of the liquor on her father’s breath—anything that would forestall the inevitable, the question that was tucked in just behind this last one, the question on the point of which everything turned, because now she heard it, murmurous and soft and sweet on her father’s attorney’s lips: “Who was driving?”

  “I just wanted to say one thing,” she said, lifting her eyes now to look at Mr. Apodaca and only Mr. Apodaca, his dog’s eyes, his pleading soft baby-talking face, “just because, well, I wanted to say you’re wrong about my mother, because she is coming home—she told me so herself, on, on the phone—” She couldn’t help herself. Her voice was cracking.

  “Yes,” he said too quickly, a hiss of breath, “yes, I understand that, Angelle, but we need to establish . . . you need to answer the question.”

  Oh, and now the silence went even deeper, the silence of the deep sea, of outer space, of the arctic night when you couldn’t hear the runners of the sled or the feet of the dogs bleeding into the snow, and her eyes jumped to her father’s then, the look on his face of hopefulness and fear and confusion, and she loved him in that moment more than she ever had.

  “Angelle,” Mr. Apodaca was saying, murmuring. “Angelle?”

  She turned her face back to him, blotting out the judge, the D.A., the woman in the plaid jacket who was probably a college student, probably cool, and waited for the question to drop.

  “Who,” Mr. Apodaca repeated, slowing it down now, “was”—slower, slower still—“driving?”

  She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they’d been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth, the truth no one would have guessed because she was almost thirteen now, almost a teenager, and she let them know it. “I was,” she said, and the courtroom roared to life with so many people buzzing at once she thought at first they hadn’t heard her. So she said it again, said it louder, much louder, so loud she might have been shouting it to the man with the camera at the back of the long churchy room with its sweat-burnished pews and the flags and emblems and all the rest. And then she looked away from the judge, away from the spectators and the man with the camera and the court recorder and the bank of windows so brilliant with light you would have thought a bomb had gone off there, and looked directly at her father.

  LA CONCHITA

  In my business, where you put something like forty to forty-five thousand miles a year on your vehicle and the sweet suck of the engine at 3,500 rpm is like another kind of breathing, you can’t afford distractions. Can’t afford to get tired or lazy or lift your eyes from the road to appreciate the way the fog reshapes the palms on Ocean Avenue or the light slips down the flanks of the mountains on that mind-blowing stretch of Highway 1 between Malibu and Oxnard. Get distracted and you could wind up meat. I know that. The truckers know that. But just about everybody else—Honda drivers, especially, and I’m sorry—don’t even know they’re behind the wheel and conscious half the time. I’ve tried to analyze it, I have. They want value, the Honda drivers, value and reliability, but they don’t want to pay for the real deal—German engineering is what I’m talking about here—and yet they still seem to think they’re part of some secret society that allows them to cut people off at will, to take advantage because they’re so in the know. So hip. So Honda. And yes, I carry a gun, a Glock 9 I keep in a special compartment I had built into the leather panel of the driver’s side door, but that doesn’t mean I want to use it. Or would use it again. Except in extremis.

  The only time I did fire it, in fact, was during that rash of freeway shootings a few months back—a statistical bubble, the police called it—when people were getting popped at the rate of two a week in the greater L.A. area. I could never figure it, really. You see some jerk swerving in and out of traffic, tailgating, and maybe you give him the finger and maybe he comes up on you, but you’re awake, aren’t you? You’ve got an accelerator and a brake pedal, right? But most people, I guess, don’t even know they’re alive in the world or that they’ve just made the driver charging up alongside them homicidal or that their engine is on fire or the road is dropping off into a crater the size of the Sea of Tranquility because they’ve got the cell clamped to the side of their head and they’re doing their nails or reading the paper. Don’t laugh. I’ve seen them watching TV, gobbling kung pao out of the carton, doing crossword puzzles and talking on two cells at once—and all at eighty miles an hour. Anyway, I just fired two slugs—blip blip. Didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger. Plus, of course, I was aiming low—just trying to perforate his rocker panels or the idiotic big-dick off-road Super Avenger tires that had him si
tting about twelve feet up off the ground. I’m not proud of it. And I probably shouldn’t have gone that far. But he cut me off—twice—and if he’d given me the finger it would have been one thing, but he didn’t even know it, didn’t even know he’d nearly run me into the median two times in the space of a minute.

  On this particular day, though, everybody seemed to keep their distance. It was just past noon and raining, the ocean stretching out on my left like a big seething cauldron, the surface of the roadway slick beneath the wheels—so slick and soft and ill-defined I had to slow to seventy in places to keep from hydroplaning. But this wasn’t just rain. This was one cell in a string of storms that had stalled over the coast for the past week, sucking load after load of moisture up out of the sea and dropping it on the hills that had burned clear of vegetation the winter before. I was already running late because of a slide at Topanga Canyon, boulders the size of SUVs in the middle of the road, cops in slickers waving their flashlights, down to two lanes, then one, and finally—I heard this on the radio after I got through, feeling stressed for time, but lucky I guess—down to none. Road closed. All she wrote.

  I didn’t like driving in the rain—it was just asking for disaster. My fellow drivers, riding their brakes and clinging to the wheel as if it were some kind of voodoo fetish that would protect them against drunks, curves, potholes, errant coyotes and sheet metal carved into knives, went to pieces the minute the first drop hit the windshield. As you might expect, the accident rate shot up something like three hundred percent every time it rained, and as I say, this wasn’t just rain in the ordinary sense. But I had a delivery to make in Santa Barbara, an urgent delivery, and if I couldn’t guarantee door-to-door faster than FedEx or Freddie Altamirano (my major competitor, who rode a ProStreet FXR and moved like a spirit raptured to heaven), then I was out of business. Plus, this wasn’t just the usual packet of bonds or stock certificates or the blockbuster screenplay passing from writer to director and back again, this was the kind of thing I handled maybe two or three times a month at most—and it never failed to give me a thrill. In the trunk, anchored firmly between two big blocks of Styrofoam, was a human liver packed in a bag of ice slurry inside a Bud Light Fun-in-the-Sun cooler, and if that sounds ridiculous, I’m sorry. That’s how it’s done. Simple fact. Ninety minutes earlier I’d picked it up at LAX because the S.B. airport was closed due to flooding, and if you want a definition of time sensitive, this was it. The recipient, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of three, was on life support at University Hospital, and I was running late and there wasn’t much I could do about it.