Fields where they lay, p.5
Fields Where They Lay, page 5
Then there are the first Christmases on your own, when you’re the founder of the feast and the magic comes back, but different, as you buy something perfect for the boy or girl you love, who will miraculously wake up next to you on Christmas morning and give you the first smile of the holiday, the holy day, the day of your tiny, scraggly, glorious tree with its handmade chain of popcorn, its four strips of tinsel, and the two presents beneath it. Later the two of you can drop by your parents’ places one after the other, comfortable in the gifts you’ve brought, generously tolerant of the ones you’re given, and secure in your knowledge that the spirit in which you now celebrate the holiday—despite its relentless hucksterism and numbing music—is somehow new and original and self-created, and massively preferable to the way your parents celebrate it.
Finally, if you’re truly fortunate, you get the first Christmas again, the infant’s Christmas, but this time the infant is your child and you’re Santa.
When you have a small child, you don’t need to be religious to find the best in Christmas. From the time Rina was born until she was seven, I had the Christmases the carols celebrate. During those years the problem between Kathy and me, which was that she wanted me to be an insurance salesman in her father’s office and I would have preferred to die slowly over a large barbecue, was forgotten at Christmastime because all that mattered was making the season magical for Rina and watching her face as she saw what we’d done. We were—and there’s no reason to avoid the word—merry.
But the problem waited as unaddressed problems do, getting darker, hairier, and more impossible to negotiate, until Rina turned seven and Kathy and I could no longer find anything big enough to sweep the trouble under and began to talk seriously about splitting up. Once the decision was made, we took it in stages to minimize its effect on Rina, with me gone a couple of nights a week, then a week every month, and then poof, after Christmas, gone for good. Didn’t matter how we tried to finesse it; the separation and the subsequent divorce devastated our daughter.
That was the beginning of what I think of as the Christmases in the Wilderness.
About the time Kathy and I began to treat the subject of our split as a genuine possibility, my life took a turn that made the relationship even more fragile and, possibly, endangered my wife and child: my occasional employment as a detective for crooks. It was a risky part-time job, but the extent of the potential risk didn’t come home to me until the murder of Frankie Tongues.
Frankie was a walking short circuit, a guy who had been raised in an especially agitated Pentecostal church where the congregation frequently gave voice to prolonged utterances in no earthly language. This glossolalia, believers say, first occurred fifty days after the crucifixion, when the Disciples (minus Judas, obviously) gathered together and the Holy Spirit burst among them in a most dramatic fashion: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting . . . and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Frankie Tongues’s congregation not only believed it, but sought ecstasy in reliving it. Loudly and, apparently, often.
This intermittently vivid upbringing left its mark on Frankie, whose nerves were agitated at the most placid of times. In moments of crisis he was likely to erupt into oratory loud enough to set off car alarms, in a language from beyond the solar system. Since Frankie made his living knocking over convenience stores, which has its inevitable tense moments, he left behind a long line of bewildered and terrified store employees and an indelible impression on one and all. One TV newscast had called him “The Jabber-Jabber Bandit,” and when you’re so memorable that the local news gives you a nickname, you’re in trouble.
Herbie Mott had attempted for years to get Frankie into a more placid line of work, one where there weren’t so many people around who could hear, such as grand theft auto, late at night. But Frankie liked to hit convenience stores. Truth be told, he got off on going in broke and coming out a couple of minutes later with a few hundred bucks and a week’s worth of Flaming Hot Cheetos, and he liked getting his toe stuck in that spiritual socket and letting fly in the hair-raising tongue of the angels. But everyone knew that sooner or later, if he didn’t either change his specialty or have his mouth sewed shut, he was going down.
Everyone who hadn’t met Frankie at the other end of a gun liked him. He was sweet, generous, and amusing when you could understand what he was saying. He was especially prized in the regular poker games Herbie’s circle of crooks enjoyed because someone who looks down at a good hand and spouts a train of syllables straight out of Little Richard does give you an advantage.
So when someone shot Frankie Tongues while he was sitting in his car, getting himself all wired up to hit yet another 7-Eleven, I was hired to figure out who called up the hit.
And I did, but he turned out to be a guy with enormous specific gravity who owned twenty-six convenience stores and about the same number of betting joints (some of the convenience stores also functioned as betting joints), and when he caught wind of me, he pointed some very nasty people on me, with intent to kill. I had to hire hitters to sit outside Kathy’s house until the threat was past.
So began the phase of my life in which I left my family’s house, put my stuff in a bunch of storage units, and started hopping among the worst dumps in the Valley and in Hollywood, both of which have especially rich veins of dumps. There was, for example, The Elf’s Village, where a truly demented woman who was only four feet tall had created an entire motel on a scale 30 percent smaller than normal, a sort of Motel Three and a Half where customers cracked their heads on the top of the doorway and hung out over both ends of the bed. Or Valentine Shmalentine, the world’s only kosher love motel.
And I stayed away for longer periods of time from the house Kathy and I had bought when we were married. When I visited them I was often an hour late because I was dodging nonexistent tails, and so jumpy I made them turn off the living room lights and spent the evening peering through a crack in the curtains.
Not the best possible environment for Christmas.
This went on for several years, during which, with the grace that it seems to me is unique to women, Rina learned to laugh at all the drama, and Kathy learned to imitate laughing at it. Gradually we found a sort of balance that allowed me to participate, in fits and starts, in my daughter’s life, even befriending her boyfriend, Tyrone, who had just a few moments ago chastised me for my laggardly approach to my daughter’s Christmas and then hung up on me.
Then I bumped into Ronnie Bigelow and fell in love with her, and things changed again. To my great surprise, Ronnie and Kathy had become amicable, if not quite friends, and Rina had made it clear that she approved. We were a cautiously cheerful foursome.
Despite an immediate and frequently gratified physical attraction, Ronnie and I had barely known each other when we had our first Christmas last year. It wasn’t until later that I realized she’d been muted and restrained through the holiday season. I figured it meant she was missing something or someone she hadn’t told me about. Ronnie treated her past as though it were classified information; if we had a major unresolved issue, to use a word that was coming up quite often, it was that I knew nothing at all about her years before I met her. This would be our first real Christmas together.
At a very recent point in our relationship, after Ronnie had saved my skin a couple of times, demonstrating interesting criminal chops as she did it, I invited her to live with me. We took up residence in the apartment I’d never shown to anyone, not even Kathy or Rina, the top secret hideaway where I had long planned to go to ground on the day when absolutely everyone wanted to kill me. I’d taken her into the most secret part of my life and invited her to share it with me, a gesture of trust that was as yet unreciprocated. She hadn’t even told me where she was born. And yes, it disturbed me, but in a way it didn’t matter. I knew she cared about me, and while I might have checked the calendar if she told me it was Friday, emotionally I trusted her entirely.
But.
But there was something about Christmas. Last year, when we were still getting to know each other, I’d written it off. This year it seemed to be serious.
Every time I tried to make plans or asked her what she wanted, she shut down. She defaulted to whatever-you-want mode, refusing to get drawn into conversation. I felt a little like a guy trying to sell a mirror to a vampire; every time I brought it up she changed rooms. Her energy dropped. A light somewhere inside her went out.
I asked what the problem was, and she said, “Nothing. I’m just not much for Christmas.”
I said, “Why not?”
She said, “Oh, you know. Are you hungry?”
I said, “We just ate.”
She looked at me for a slow count of three and said, “Then allow me to rephrase the question. Are you still hungry?”
What it looked like to me was that I should add Christmas to the list of things I wasn’t supposed to ask her about.
So I had yet another issue with Christmas.
7
If People Have Touched it, It’s Dirty
By 7 p.m., I felt like Edgerton Mall was the seventh level of hell and I’d already been there for the prescribed eternity. It had apparently started to rain outside because people had wet hair, there was a prevailing funk of damp cloth, and the floor, none too appealing to begin with, was slippery and streaked with mud, as were the previously snow-white paths to Santa’s thrones. Other than those clues, for all I knew of the outside world, the Great Wave had finally crested the mountains and washed away everything on earth except the mall. And I’d only been there five hours. I couldn’t fathom how people could work an eight-hour day in this place, locked away from everything that mattered in their lives, everything that wasn’t valued in bills and coins.
As long as I was wandering in and out of stores anyway, I searched for solutions to the seasonal conundrum that Tyrone had brought home to me: What to buy? For Rina, I saw and rejected a “Dear Daughter” necklace, engraved with a sentiment that I found simultaneously cloying and embarrassingly accurate; a set of empowering refrigerator magnets about strong teenage girls who had their own refrigerators; and, most surprisingly, a collection of small stuffed toys based on human organs: putatively cute, smiling little livers and kidneys and bladders and hearts with weensy, creepy hands and feet. I actually almost bought those, but sanity prevailed. There’s no point in giving a horrible gift unless you have a great one to follow it with. In one store, the inevitable thrift shop of off-brand, mid-level, mildly outdated tech (called, in this case, iShop), I found something I did buy, but it was a minor note in the hoped-for Christmas symphony of gifts, a collection of little Bluetooth tags that let you use your phone to find your keys or whatever else you’ve lost. After a moment’s deliberation, I got one for Ronnie, too. Here we were, on the next-to-last night before Christmas, and I hadn’t bought anything for her, either.
Acting on an afterthought, I pulled one of the sets from the bag and looked for directions. There weren’t any. I asked the geek who’d waited on me, an ambiguously old-looking guy with the face of a dodgy teen and a halo of prematurely silvery hair, where the directions were, and he said in a tone that suggested that I’d already asked him that same question seven hundred times, “You DL the app. The instructions are in the app.”
I thought about asking whether the app was free but I wasn’t sure I could handle any more techno-scorn, so I just said thanks and wandered out of the place. Once I was on the safe side of the door, I looked at the sign and noticed, in a retro matrix printer font beneath the store’s name, iShop, the words wink simmons, proprietor. I figured maybe he was just pissed off at being named Wink.
Earlier, during an hour or so that seemed to last forever, I’d talked to about a dozen store owners and managers, encountering an impressive uniformity of gloom. All was not well either in Edgerton or in bricks-and-mortar capitalism in general. Yes, they’d been stolen from, most of them; yes, they were suffering record losses; no, neither the mall’s security systems nor their own employees had flagged many of the thieves. I tested that last assertion on my own and found it to be true: the success rate of my post-Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac shoplifting experience zoomed to about 65 percent. I’d also developed some theories about how to block one’s actions from the prying eyes of the security cameras, unlikely as it was that Wally was watching the monitor I happened to be on as I bagged my swag, rather than one of the thirty-one others, or, for that matter, his iPhone.
Elementary-school easy, in other words. The question was probably why more stuff wasn’t getting kiped.
I was standing once again on the third tier, looking down at the shoppers—the crowd thinner now that it was dinnertime—and trying to figure out what had caught my eye before about the way the crowd moved, when my phone rang again.
Unknown, it read. I punched in and said, “Yeah?”
“What have you learned?” Vlad said.
“I’ll call you when I have something specific,” I said, and hung up. It rang again immediately.
“Do not hang up on me,” he said. “Never. And do not think you know what is specific or what matters.”
“Okay, here’s what I know so far. It’s a good thing the world’s nuclear secrets or the keys to the kingdom aren’t kept here, because this place is a thief’s theme park. Two-thirds of the doorways aren’t alarmed, including the ones in and out of the mall—”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I filled a shopping bag with stolen merchandise from stores all over the place and went through one of your outside doors twice. After stealing all that stuff. Your alarms stink. Your surveillance cameras are old, low-res clunkers and you don’t have enough people watching them. There are corners all over the place where you can stash stuff and recover it later. You name it, it’s broken.”
“This is what I mean,” he said. “Nothing you have said matters.”
“Then perhaps you could take a moment and provide me with a job description.”
“I could have told you all of this at lunch today. Those have been the conditions for years. It was cheap to install and maintain, and until this month it held losses from theft to an acceptable level.”
“Acceptable to whom?”
“I am the only one who matters,” he said. “I will give you a small pat on the back for having learned all this, but it is something any cheap thief could spot. I was hoping for more.”
“And you might have gotten it if you’d bothered to share some of this with me.”
“Feh,” he said. “I had no idea it would surprise you. There is no mall from which it is impossible to steal. This is the issue: shoplifting for the past six weeks is up three hundred percent from average—”
“Hundred and twenty is what your security guy—”
“Mr. Bender, tell me, do I give a shit what my security people think? Where do you think that idiot got his number?”
“Right,” I said. I leaned over far enough to rest my forehead on the railing, hearing my mother say, If people have touched it, it’s dirty.
Vlad was still talking. “And I gave him that number for a reason, and you don’t tell him otherwise. Yes?”
“Fine.” The railing was cool and smelled vaguely fudge-like.
“You had best pick up your feet a bit. Trot, if you will. Time is flying.”
“Not here, it isn’t.”
“But it is for you.”
I stood up. “I have to tell you, Vlad, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I am not Vlad. Did you think this was a lifetime job? A what’s the word?”
“Who cares?” I said.
“Sinecure,” he said. “It is not. You have a deadline, and you should take that word seriously. Both syllables.”
I ignored the threat for the moment, although it took an effort. “And would you like to share my deadline with me, or is that also something I’m supposed to figure out for myself?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Christmas Eve.”
“I take Christmas Eve off.”
“Yes, Trey said you were difficult.”
“And look how well she’s doing.”
“She is doing much better than you and your family will be if you do not—”
I wasn’t hearing him anymore. There were black spots like burn-blossoms on film, expanding before my eyes. “You know what, you pretentious, overdressed Russky thug? Fuck you and your blue blazer, too. Everybody has to die sometime.”
I hung up, almost gasping for breath, and a few seconds later, the phone buzzed to signal a text. Figuring that Tyrone had thought of something he didn’t want to say in front of Rina, I brought it up.
It said: but our children should not die first.
8
The Good Thief
It took me the better part of ten minutes sitting in a toilet stall with a broken lock, the second stall I’d tried, pushing the door closed with my feet and clamping my tongue between my teeth, to get myself under control. A threat against me is sort of emotional junk mail; they’ve been delivered frequently enough that the novelty has worn off. A threat against Rina or Kathy, on the other hand—that opens the black area of my mind where murder is stored.
My immediate impulse was to have the son of a bitch hit, but I’d done that twice in the past few months and I didn’t want it to become a habit. First, it’s lazy, and second, it’s inevitable that every time you do it, more people know about it—the hitter, the person through whom you contracted the hitter, the ever-widening circle of people they talk to, the people who put two and two together on their own. Sooner or later it reaches a critical mass, some mouth runs when it shouldn’t, and you either get caught or you’re tagged in some permanent fashion.
