“As if you care about the water table.”
“I've got my standards.”
“One of which obviously isn't waiting for people to get home before you raid their houses.”
“You're lucky it was only me,” he said. “It's pretty dumb to go off and leave the windows open. Your screens are complete shit. A pocket knife. That's all it took.”
China saw her brother's means of access into her house since, in Cherokee's typical fashion, he'd done nothing to hide how he'd managed to enter. One of the two living room windows was without its old screen, which had been easy enough for Cherokee to remove since only a metal hook and eye had held it in place against the sill. At least her brother had had enough sense to break in through a window that was off the street and out of sight of the neighbours, any one of whom would have willingly called the police.
She went through to the kitchen, the bottle of Pellegrino in her hand. She poured what was left of the mineral water into a glass with a wedge of lime. She swirled it round, drank it down, and put the glass in the sink, unsatisfied and annoyed.
“What're you doing here?” she asked her brother. “How'd you get up here? Did you fix your car?”
“That piece of crap?” He padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, pulled it open, and browsed through the plastic bags of fruit and vegetables inside. He emerged with a red bell pepper, which he took to the sink and meticulously washed off before scoring a knife from a drawer and slicing the pepper in half. He cleaned both halves and handed one of them to China. “I've got some things going so I won't need a car anyway.”
China ignored the hook implied in his final remark. She knew how her brother cast his bait. She set her half of the red bell pepper on the kitchen table. She went into her bedroom to change her clothes. The leather was like wearing a sauna in this weather. It looked terrific, but it felt like hell. “Everyone needs a car. I hope you haven't come up here thinking you're going to borrow mine,” she called out to him. “Because if you have, the answer is no in advance. Ask Mom. Borrow hers. I assume she's still got it.”
“You coming down for Thanksgiving?” Cherokee called back.
“Who wants to know?”
“Guess.”
“Her phone doesn't work all of a sudden?”
“I told her I was coming up. She asked me to ask you. You coming or what?”
“I'll talk to Matt.” She hung the leather trousers in the closet, did the same with the vest, and tossed her silk blouse into the dry-cleaning bag. She threw on a loose Hawaiian dress and grabbed her sandals from the shelf. She rejoined her brother.
“Where is Matt, anyway?” He'd finished his half of the pepper and had started on hers.
She removed it from his hand and took a bite. The meat was cool and sweet, a modest anodyne to the heat and her thirst. “Away,” she told him. “Cherokee, would you put your clothes on, please?”
“Why?” He leered and thrust his pelvis at her. “Am I turning you on?”
“You're not my type.”
“Away where?”
“New York. He's on business. Are you going to get dressed?”
He shrugged and left her. A moment later she heard the bang of the screen door as he went outside to retrieve the rest of his clothes. She found an uncooled bottle of Calistoga water in the musty broom closet that served as her pantry. At least it was something sparkling, she thought. She rooted out ice and poured herself a glassful.
“You didn't ask.”
She swung around. Cherokee was dressed, as requested, his T-shirt shrunk from too many washes and his blue jeans resting low on his hips. Their bottoms grazed the linoleum, and as she looked her brother over, China thought not for the first time how misplaced he was in time. With his too-long sandy curls, his scruffy clothes, his bare feet, and his demeanour, he looked like a refugee from the summer of love. Which would doubtless make their mother proud, make his father approve, and make her father laugh. But it made China . . . well, annoyed. Despite his age and his toned physique, Cherokee still looked too vulnerable to be out on his own.
“So you didn't ask me,” he said.
“Ask you what?”
“What I've got going. Why I won't be needing a car anymore. I thumbed, by the way. Hitchhiking's gone to crap, though. Took me since yesterday lunchtime to get here.”
“Which is why you need a car.”
“Not for what I've got in mind.”
“I've already said. I'm not lending you my car. I need it for work. And why aren't you in class? Have you dropped out again?”
“Quit. I needed more free time to do the papers. That's taken off in a very big way. I've got to tell you, the number of conscienceless college students these days just boggles the mind, Chine. If I wanted to do this for a career, I'd probably be able to retire when I'm forty.”
China rolled her eyes. The papers were term papers, take-home essay tests, the occasional master's thesis, and, so far, two doctoral dissertations. Cherokee wrote them for university students who had the cash and who couldn't be bothered to write the papers themselves. This had long ago raised the question of why Cherokee—who'd never received less than a B on something he'd written for payment—couldn't himself get up the steam to remain in college. He'd been in and out of the University of California so many times that the institution practically had a revolving door with his name above it. But Cherokee had a facile explanation for his exceedingly blotted college career: “If the UC system would just pay me to do my work what the students pay me to do their work, I'd do the work.”
“Does Mom know you've dropped out again?” she asked her brother.
“I've cut the strings.”
“Sure you have.” China hadn't had lunch, and she was beginning to feel it. She pulled out the fixings for a salad from the refrigerator and from the cupboard took down one plate, a subtle hint that she hoped her brother would take.
“So, ask me.” He dragged a chair out from the kitchen table and plopped down. He reached for one of the apples that a dyed basket held in the centre of the table and he had it all the way to his mouth before he seemed to realise it was artificial.
She unwrapped the romaine and began to tear it onto her plate. “Ask you what?”
“You know. You're avoiding the question. Okay. I'll ask it for you. ‘What's the big plan, Cherokee? What've you got going? Why won't you be needing a car?' The answer: because I'm getting a boat. And the boat's going to provide it all. Transportation, income, and housing.”
“You just keep thinking, Butch,” China murmured, more to herself than to him. In so many ways Cherokee had lived his thirty-three years like that Wild West outlaw: There was always a scheme to get rich quick, have something for nothing, and live the good life.
“No,” he said. “Listen. This is sure-fire. I've already found the boat. It's down in Newport. It's a fishing boat. Right now it takes people out from the harbour. Big bucks a pop. They go after bonita. Mostly it's day trips, but for bigger bucks—and I'm talking significant big ones here—they go down to Baja. It needs some work but I'd live on the boat while I fixed it up. Buy what I need at marine chandleries—don't need a car for that—and I'd take people out year-round.”
“What d'you know about fishing? What d'you know about boating? And where're you getting the money, anyway?” China chopped off part of a cucumber and began slicing it onto the romaine. She considered her question in conjunction with her brother's propitious arrival on her doorstep and said, “Cherokee, don't even go there.”
“Hey. What d'you think I am? I said that I've got something going, and I do. Hell. I thought you'd be happy for me. I didn't even ask Mom for the money.”
“Not that she has it.”
“She's got the house. I could've asked her to sign it over to me so I could get a second on it and raise the money that way. She would've gone for it. You know she would.”
There was truth in that, China thought. When hadn't she gone for one of Cherokee's schemes? He'
s asthmatic had been her excuse in childhood. It had simply mutated through the years to he's a man.
That left China herself as the choice of a source. She said, “Don't think of me, either, okay? What I've got goes to me, to Matt, and to the future.”
“As if.” Cherokee pushed away from the table. He walked to the kitchen door and opened it, resting his hands on the frame and looking out into the sun-parched back yard.
“As if what?”
“Forget it.”
China washed two tomatoes and began to chop them. She cast a glance at her brother and saw that he was frowning and chewing on the inside of his lower lip. She could read Cherokee River like a billboard at fifty yards: There were machinations going on in his mind.
“I've got money saved,” he said. “Sure, it's not enough but I've got a chance to make a little bundle that'll help me out.”
“And you're saying that you haven't hitchhiked all the way up here to ask me to make a contribution? You spent twenty-four hours on the side of the road in order to make a social call? To tell me your plans? To ask me if I'm going to Mom's for Thanksgiving? This isn't exactly computing, you know. There're telephones. E-mail. Telegrams. Smoke signals.”
He turned from the doorway and watched her brushing the dirt from four mushrooms. “Actually,” he finally said, “I've got two free tickets to go to Europe and I thought my little sister might like to tag along. That's why I'm here. To ask you to go. You've never been, have you? Call it an early Christmas present.”
China lowered her knife. “Where the hell did you get two free tickets to Europe?”
“Courier service.”
He went on to explain. Couriers, he said, transported materials from the United States to points around the globe when the sender didn't trust the post office, Federal Express, UPS, or any other carrier to get them to their destination on time, safely, or undamaged. Corporations or individuals provided a prospective traveler with the ticket he needed to get to a destination—sometimes with a fee as well—and once the package was placed into the hands of the recipient, the courier was free to enjoy the destination or to travel onward from there.
In Cherokee's case, he'd seen a posting on a notice board at UC Irvine from someone—“Turned out to be an attorney in Tustin”—looking for a courier to take a package to the UK in return for payment and two free airline tickets. Cherokee applied, and he was selected, with the proviso that he “dress more businesslike and do something about the hair.”
“Five thousand bucks to make the delivery,” Cherokee concluded happily. “Is this a good deal or what?”
“What the hell? Five thousand dollars?” In China's experience, things that seemed too good to be true generally were. “Wait a minute, Cherokee. What's in the package?”
“Architectural plans. That's one of the reasons I thought of you right off for the second ticket. Architecture. It's right up your alley.” Cherokee returned to the table, swung the chair around this time, and straddled it backwards.
“So why doesn't the architect take the plans over himself? Why doesn't he send them on the Internet? There's a program for that, and if no one has it at the other end, why doesn't he send the plans over on a disk?”
“Who knows? Who cares? Five thousand bucks and a free ticket? They can send their plans by rowboat if they want to.”
China shook her head and went back to her salad. “It sounds way fishy. You're on your own.”
“Hey. This is Europe we're talking about. Big Ben. The Eiffel Tower. The frigging Colosseum.”
“You'll have a great time. If you're not arrested at customs with heroin.”
“I'm telling you this is completely legit.”
“Five thousand dollars just to carry a package? I don't think so.”
“Come on, China. You've got to go.”
There was something in his voice when he said that, an edge that tried to wear the guise of eagerness but tilted too closely to desperation. China said warily, “What's going on? You'd better tell me.”
Cherokee picked at the vinyl cord around the top of the seatback. He said, “The deal is . . . I have to take my wife.”
“What?”
“I mean the courier. The tickets. They're for a couple. I didn't know that at first but when the attorney asked me if I was married, I could tell he wanted a yes answer so I gave him one.”
“Why?”
“What difference does it make? How's anyone going to know? We have the same last name. We don't look alike. We can just pretend—”
“I mean why does a couple have to take the package over? A couple wearing business clothes? A couple that've done ‘something to their hair'? Something to make them look innocuous, legitimate, and above suspicion? Good grief, Cherokee. Get some brains. This is a smuggling scam and you'll end up in jail.”
“Don't be so paranoid. I've checked it out. This is an attorney we're talking about.”
“Oh, that gives me buckets of confidence.” She lined the circumference of her plate with baby carrots and tossed a handful of pepitas on top. She sprinkled the salad with lemon juice and carried the plate to the table. “I'm not going for it. You'll need to find someone else to play Mrs. River.”
“There is no one else. And even if I could find someone that fast, the ticket has to say River and the passport has to match the ticket and . . . Come on, China.” He sounded like a little boy, frustrated because a plan that had seemed so simple to him, so easily set up with a trip to Santa Barbara, was proving to be otherwise. And that was one hundred percent Cherokee: I've got an idea and surely the world will go along with it.
But China wouldn't. She loved her brother. Indeed, despite the fact that he was older than she, she'd spent part of her adolescence and most of her childhood mothering him. But regardless of her devotion to Cherokee, she wasn't going to accommodate him in a scheme that might well raise easy money at the same time as it put both of them at risk.
“No way,” she told him. “Forget it. Get a job. You've got to join the real world sometime.”
“That's what I'm trying to do here.”
“Then get a regular job. You'll have to eventually. It might as well be now.”
“Oh, great.” He surged up from his chair. “That's really terrifically great, China. Get a regular job. Join the real world. So I'm trying to do that. I have an idea for a job and a home and money all at once, but that's apparently not good enough for you. It has to be the real world and a job on exactly your terms.” He strode to the door and flung himself out into the yard.
China followed him. A birdbath stood in the centre of the thirsty lawn, and Cherokee dumped out its water, took up a wire brush at its base, and furiously attacked the ridged basin, scrubbing away its film of algae. He marched to the house, where a hose lay coiled, and turned it on, tugging it over to refill the basin for the birds.
“Look,” China began.
“Forget it,” he said. “It sounds stupid to you. I sound stupid to you.”
“Did I say that?”
“I don't want to live like the rest of the world—eight-to-five working for the man and a lousy paycheck—but you don't approve of that. You think there's only one way to live and if anyone has a different idea, it's bullshit, stupid, and liable to end them up in jail.”
“Where's all this coming from?”
“What I'm supposed to do, according to you, is work for peanuts, save the peanuts, and put enough of the peanuts together so I can end up married with a mortgage and kids and a wife who will maybe be more of a wife and a mother than Mom was to anyone. But that's your life plan, okay? It isn't mine.” He flung the burbling hose to the ground, where water flowed onto the dusty lawn.
“This has nothing to do with anyone's life plan. It's basic sense. Look at what you're proposing, for God's sake. Look at what's been proposed to you.”
“Money,” he said. “Five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars that I God damn need.”
“So you can buy a boat you know no
thing about running? To take people out fishing God only knows where? Think things through for once, okay? If not the boat then at least the courier idea.”
“Me?” He barked a laugh. “I should think things through? Just when the hell're you going to do that?”
“Me? What—”
“It's really amazing. You can tell me how to live my life while yours is a running joke and you don't even know it. And here I am, giving you a decent chance to get out of it for the first time in what . . . ten years? more? . . . and all you—”
“What? Get out of what?”
“—can do is put me down. Because you don't like the way I live. And you won't see the way you live is worse.”
“What do you know about the way I live?” She felt her own anger now. She hated the way her brother turned conversations. If you wanted to have a discussion with him about the choices he'd made or wanted to make, he invariably turned the spotlight onto you. That spotlight always became an attack in which only the nimble-footed could emerge unscathed. “I haven't seen you for months. You show up here, break into my house, tell me you need my help in some shady deal, and when I don't cooperate the way you expect me to, suddenly everything becomes my fault. But I'm not going to play that game.”
“Sure. You'd rather play the one Matt's got going.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” China demanded. But at the mention of Matt, she couldn't help it: She felt the skeletal finger of fear touch her spine.
“God, China. You think I'm stupid. But when the hell're you going to figure things out?”
“Figure what things? What are you talking about?”
“All this about Matt. Living for Matt. Saving your money ‘for me and Matt and the future.' It's ludicrous. No. It's sure-as-hell pathetic. You're standing right in front of me with your head so far up your butt that you haven't figured out—” He stopped himself. It seemed as if he suddenly remembered where he was, with whom he was, and what had gone before to bring them both to this place. He stooped and grabbed up the hose, carrying it back to the house and turning the water off. He coiled the hose back to the ground with too much precision.