A part of today’s population are twenty-three outsiders, bearing with them twenty-three stories of childhood, training, decisions, and work—all the events that brought these adults out of Indiana and India, Australia and Austin, England and New England, and set them down at a California middle school’s Career Day.
The growing dawn finds a few cars already in the staff lot. Lights go on in the cafeteria, where low-income students will soon gather for government-subsidized breakfasts. The jet-lagged passenger overhead hears the flight attendant’s recitation, and pulls his gaze from the placid landscape to search for his shoes. He does not see the long, white-topped buses emerging from the district lot. In forty minutes, the first of them will deliver its load of noisy adolescents to Guadalupe Middle School.
The morning will pass, devoted to dreams. The Visitor’s lot will fill, guests will be welcomed and introduced, then escorted to their respective classrooms.
By the time lunch hour comes, the school will be exploding with energy as young hearts whirl around the sheer possibilities of the lifetime stretching out before them. More prosaically, the guests will be fed, then their stories will resume.
The firefighter will speak not only of heroism, but of injuries and insurance premiums. The forensic technician will balance the satisfaction of figuring things out and locking bad guys away against the boredom of testimony, the paperwork, and the sense of being a small part of a large team. The game designer will describe how difficult it is to make a profit out of those thrilling red splashes on a screen. The weaver will make no effort to conceal her dependence on luck, and the propensity of artists to starve. Students will be given the raw material for their life’s plan, and shown the means to turn it into their life’s tapestry.
All that is, at least, the plan.
But today, the weaving of dreams will unravel long before the final bell.
A long white van will drive onto the school grounds. A dark figure will get out. Carrying a heavy nylon bag, he will walk calmly into the school from the side road. The door to classroom B18 will open, and not quite shut again.
Two minutes later, the first pop-pop will echo across the quads and fields.
Adult voices will stutter into silence; adolescent heads will snap up; farm workers in the field across the road will straighten, looking at each other in wide-eyed disbelief. At the next pop-pop-pop, a wave of fear will crash across the school. A woman walking through the playing fields will drop her bag and break into a run; another woman in the school office will scramble from her chair. Before the two come together, the midday sun will be sparkling off a thread of blood oozing down the center of the concrete quad.
Career Day, at Guadalupe Middle School.
107 DAYS AGO OCTOBER 31
Olivia
When the call came in, Olivia thought it was just another Halloween prank.
Olivia hated Halloween—and had long before she became a cop. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she’d lived in a more white-bread town, but having the Anglo holiday of candy and costumes smack up against Día de Muertos made for an orgy of sugar and disguises and trouble.
When she was a kid, white makeup scared her and she was allergic to the pungent marigolds that were traditional to the holiday. As a teenager, she’d had some bad experiences at parties. As an adult, she hid in her darkened house as the neighborhood dogs worked themselves into a frenzy. And as a cop…
As a cop, she’d seen too much. The mix of manic kids and whimsical death—Día de Muertos has a particular focus on the death of children—made her stomach knot as October wore on.
Her first season in the Department, eleven years ago, an old-timer had warned her that worst of all was when October 31 fell on a Monday. She’d laughed, thinking this was like Friday the 13th or craziness under a full moon, but she wasn’t laughing long: a Monday Halloween followed by the two days of Día de Muertos meant the lunacy began at dusk Friday and didn’t let up until Thursday morning.
This year was her third Monday Halloween on the police force. The Department’s overtime budget for the month was already blown, with two drunken crashes, a house fire caused by a jack-o’-lantern, a shoot-out, and eleven brawls: four in bars, one in the bowling alley, two in grocery stores (the bloodiest one over the last package of bargain candy), and the rest in neighborhoods over smashed pumpkins. The movie theater shut when its late-night horror film sparked a little too much audience participation.
She’d told herself all day that by the time darkness fell everyone would be sick of it all—sick, or under arrest—but she didn’t believe it. Once dusk gave way to darkness, the adolescents would come out and gang rivalries would mix with the wildness in the air. If only it would rain! If only Thursday would come. She was tired and cranky and she’d eaten two of the three sugar skulls the desk guy had brought in.
That’s why, when the phone rang Halloween evening, she thought it was a joke.
—
There’d been a recent rediscovery of prank calls, a thing of the past due to caller ID, when local kids found that they could use disposable phones, stolen ones, or the surviving public box behind the thrift store. The fad would die after a couple of arrests, but because the Department was too pushed to hunt down the perpetrators, any call the 911 dispatcher suspected of being a prank—anything short of a blood-on-the-ground emergency—was being diverted to the Department for triage.
The call came in on the dedicated line at 6:40, that dividing line between innocent dusk and troublesome darkness. With a sigh, Olivia put down her case notes from the Gloria Rivas murder and picked up the receiver: would this be a report from the Russian gangster Yuri Nator, or a giggling bomb threat?
“Sergeant Mendez, San Felipe Police Department, how may I—”
A man’s voice cut her off. “My daughter’s not home.”
He sounded irritated rather than worried, as if Sergeant Olivia Mendez were personally to blame for this disruption of his evening. “How old is your daughter, sir?”
“Ten—eleven, I guess.”
Olivia carried on a silent conversation with the remaining decorated skull on her desk. The slur of his words suggested the man was drunk—she hoped to hell he hadn’t just arrived home. Would it be worse if he’d been home for several drinks and just discovered his child wasn’t there? In either case, she wasn’t keen on pulling a car off the streets for a guy who’d forgotten what day it was.
“It’s Halloween, sir. Could your wife have taken her trick-or-treating?”
“I don’t have a wife.”
“Well, someone else, then?”
“Why would she go trick-or-treating? She doesn’t like candy.”
Then she’s like no other kid I’ve ever met, Olivia did not say aloud. She reached for her pad. “Okay, sir, I’ll send someone by, but it’ll be a while—we’ve got some troubles in town. Could I have your name and address?”
“This is Chuck Cuomo,” he said impatiently—and before Olivia could hunt down why she ought to know his name, he provided it. “I run the car dealership. It’s my daughter, Bee.”
She wrote down Bee Cuomo—father Chuck—and the address, sketching a martini glass on the pad as she asked if he’d phoned any of Bee’s friends, and listened to his bluster that the girl had no friends, and in any case he didn’t have their phone numbers.
She was about to interrupt—who the hell didn’t know his daughter’s friends?—when he said the words that made all the difference, the words that were to define the coming months in San Felipe, the words that pushed aside the Gloria Rivas murder and the Taco Alvarez paperwork and the follow-ups to house fires and bar fights.
“There was a call from her school on the machine when I got home. Why the hell they didn’t use my cell number I couldn’t tell you. Maybe they didn’t have it? I don’t know. Anyway, they called to say she wasn’t there, like that weird kid and his mother said.”
Olivia Mendez sat up in her chair. “Sir? Bee wasn’t where?”
“She w
asn’t at school today. Jesus, don’t you speak English?” He made a noise under his breath, and continued with an exaggerated enunciation. “The secretary at Guadalupe phoned and left a message to say Bee Cuomo was not in school today and was this an excused absence? Of course it wasn’t, but there’s nobody answering the phone there at this time of night, so I—”
This time she did cut him off. “Sir, I’ll be right out. Don’t disturb anything in her room, but see if you can remember the names of her friends. And, Mr. Cuomo? Maybe you should make yourself a pot of coffee.”
She hung up and yanked open the drawer where she kept her holstered gun.
Día de Muertos.
Olivia looked at the sugar skull on her desk, and shuddered.
6:58
Linda
Linda McDonald glared at the mirror in disgust. Why on earth had she thought this was a good week for a new hairstyle?
Her exercise in self-loathing was interrupted by an English drawl from the next room. “Have you ever considered how odd it is that the word career as a noun refers to the methodical choices of a person’s professional life, while as a verb it means to veer wildly out of control?”
“Thanks, Gordon, that’s just what I need to hear on this particular morning.” Linda bent over the bathroom drawer, crossly flinging around the contents as if a choice of eye shadow might improve matters. When she straightened again, he had moved with his usual disconcerting silence and was standing right behind her. His arms reached out, and Linda caught back her immediate impulse to pull away and exclaim You’re all sweaty—we don’t have time—oh my blouse! Beyond that initial twitch, she did not resist. Gordon was rarely demonstrative (he was English, after all) but he had a way of knowing when nothing but physical communication would do.
In any event, exclamations over clean blouses—and, below that, the mistrust of touch that she had worked so hard to kill and bury deep—belonged to the surface Linda, the woman she should have been, and still looked like.
Besides which, she’d idiotically put on the white blouse with the dangerously loose button. If Gordon hadn’t forced her to look at herself, she might have raised her arms in the assembly and…
Smiling for the first time that morning, Linda closed her eyes and leaned back against this man who was her husband. He tucked his unshaven face into the soft skin under her ear, and she stood, breathing in his smells: male sweat, shoe polish, fresh coffee. The odd suggestion of hut-smoke that always seemed to cling to his person. All the pheromones that were Gordon. Her thoughts ceased to throw themselves against the cage of her mind as she leaned, and breathed. After a while, she let her eyes come open, gazing at their two-headed reflection in the mirror. His irises today were more gold than green.
His voice rumbled in her ear. “You will do just fine. Your talk is perfect.”
“They’ll be too busy gawking at my hair to notice what I’m saying.”
“You look lovely.”
“I look scalped.”
His stubble made a sound against the blouse fabric as he shook his head. “No, I’ve seen scalped people. You look nothing like them.”
She frowned at the crinkles beside his eyes, then noticed that the expression made her look a lot older than fifty-three. “Four years since you showed up on my doorstep, and I still can’t always tell when you’re joking.”
His face relaxed fully into a smile, his arms fell away. “May I shower now?”
“Make it quick, if you’re going with me.” She shoved the drawer in, gave a last glare at the too-modern haircut, then ducked out before his T-shirt came off and his back came into view. Her fingertips might find that intricate ritual of scars bizarrely compelling, but her eyes saw only the slow pull of a stone blade through flesh.
THIRTY YEARS AGO
Gordon: his story (1)
All kinds of human flotsam washed up in highland New Guinea in the 1980s, riding the tides of God, or gold, or anthropological glory: missionaries seeking heathen sheep for the fold; multinational corporations eager for riches gouged from the earth; scholars re-writing their disciplines in light of these modern Stone Age people. Then there were the misfits, in search of adventure, or fortune, or simply an escape into the earth’s last wild frontier.
Linda McDonald was one of the missionaries.
And when the tiny Air Niugini prop plane turned to taxi away down the Mt. Hagen runway, it was all she could do not to bolt down the rutted tarmac in pursuit.
She told herself that it wasn’t fear making her heart pound, it was disorientation. Simple jet lag. The past two forty-eight hours had been Linda’s third time to leave Indianapolis in her whole life, and her first-ever venture out of the United States. She had crossed a continent, an ocean, and half of Australia before she’d hit the stupefying heat and humidity of Port Moresby—only to stand appalled before a wall in the terminal that seemed to be splashed with blood. Yes, the Papua New Guinea highlands had been home to cannibals a generation or two ago, but the missionary school hadn’t said anything about violence in the capital city. Maybe it was some weird kind of animal sacrifice? Primitives fearful of the jet age, ensuring a safe arrival through blood-letting? In that case (her fatigued brain went on) shouldn’t there be actual dead animals in the corners, or pens of live ones waiting…?
Her hallucinatory speculations were interrupted by a citizen, black of skin and short of stature, who strolled past one particularly gory wall and shot a precisely aimed stream of red spittle from between his teeth.
Ah: betel nut. She’d heard of that.
The plane out of Port Moresby—which was either the morning flight leaving very late or the afternoon one half a day early—worked its way up-country, landing in Mt. Hagen distressingly near dusk: an hour, apparently, when any sensible human, expatriate or local, was sitting down to dinner: the airport was deserted. The air smelled of smoke, and rain, and a whole lot of green.
The plane had laid tire-tracks across one of her Samsonites when it circled to leave.
Linda pulled her inadequate rain jacket together, shivering and bewildered. This was an airport, with buildings all around: why was there no sign of life? She wanted to sit on her luggage and weep. And might have, if it hadn’t been so cold—this was the tropics, but Mt. Hagen was a mile high. Come on, Linda: moving will warm you up. And you’re sure to find someone. Someone who isn’t a cannibal.
She picked up her two suitcases to stagger in the direction of what looked to be the Mt. Hagen terminal. Within ten steps, she was dripping with a horrid mixture of sweat and rain. The handles of the heavy cases became increasingly slick, and at one stumble over a rough patch of tarmac, the left one slipped from her hand, splashed down in a particularly deep pothole, and vomited its T-shirts and Keds into the mud. She said a word that missionaries do not say, and let the tears spill.
She managed to force most of the sodden contents back inside, and was struggling with the clasp when motion caught the corner of her eye: a scrap of yellow flitting rapidly behind the buildings. She forced the latch shut, clawed her wet hair from her eyes, and waited for the vehicle to zoom on by—but miracle of miracles, it turned in, roaring down the runway as if intending to sprout wings and take to the skies. Instead, it came to a halt next to Linda’s bedraggled self.
“You look rather stranded.” The man’s voice sounded too posh for an Australian.
He was a heavily tanned, clean-shaven, stoop-shouldered expatriate in his forties, high of forehead and bad of teeth; one glance and she was touched by a powerful aura of malaria-racked Victorian expeditions into West Africa, of the besieged administrators of troubled provinces, of wild-eyed Englishmen pressing into the desert on camels or the Antarctic on dog-sleds. Or highland New Guinea in an open-sided yellow jeep. The stranger set the hand-brake and stepped jauntily from the open door, dressed in a button-down, short-sleeved blue shirt, flip-flop sandals, and the sort of khaki shorts that everyone but that kind of man looks ridiculous in.
Later, making subtle inq
uiries that fooled no one, she would uncover few facts about him, and much rumor: He’d come to teach, and been fired—or quit in disgust. He was on the run from the law of Angola, or was it Albania? He was the father of three, fleeing a dangerous marriage to a drug lord’s daughter, or an aristocratic homosexual escaping repressive laws and social condemnation. He was a mercenary wanted for war crimes in some dry African nation.
He was, of course, English, the sort of Englishman who could only have been formed on the playing fields of Eton, his spine stiffened by a regime of genial parental abandonment followed by institutionalized brutality: unsparing of himself, impervious to mere bodily discomfort, and always a step removed from intimacy with his peers. Later, Linda came to realize that both his bone-deep humanity and his utter disdain for authority had been driven into him by the same rods of discipline.
But she knew none of that then; she merely grasped that rescue was at hand. Also, that his eyes were an interesting shade of hazel, or perhaps amber. “Well, yes, it looks like I am kind of stranded. I thought I’d be met, but I’m not quite sure what day it is, and the plane seemed to just sort of collect passengers, and someone told me that we were stopping at a place we weren’t scheduled to—” Linda heard her mouth babbling, and shut it.
“Well, we’ll soon have you sorted,” he said briskly. And indeed, half her possessions were already inside the jeep. She handed him the plastic bag with her hair rollers, which she hadn’t been able to jam back into the suitcase, and walked around to what was here the passenger side.