Excerpt from 'Babe in Paradise'
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Chapter One
Contents
1 BABE IN PARADISE.................................................11 2 TWO CRIMINALS....................................................33 3 WHAT I SAW FROM WHERE I STOOD...................................59 4 THIEF............................................................81 5 FALLING BODIES..................................................103 6 GUNSMOKE........................................................129 7 STATUES.........................................................157 8 THE MISSING.....................................................179 9 THE PASSENGER...................................................211
Chapter One BABE IN PARADISE
The hills were on fire. Babe stood high up on a ladder and flung a bucket of water across the shingles of her roof. She handed the pail down to Delia, her mother, who stood below on the ground. The night was dark. No stars shone through the thick layer of blackness. The only illumination came from the flashlight Delia trained on the roof, its orb bobbing unsteadily under her nervous guidance. The beam of light slid down off the house and traveled across the lawn with Delia as she moved to fill the pail from the outside spigot. Then she slowly made her way back to the ladder, her thin flame listing with the load. She rested the bucket on the ground and looked up at her daughter. Babe tried to ignore the anxious set of her mother's face and the way Delia repeatedly bit into her lower lip. Carefully, she climbed down the ladder to retrieve the water. Babe felt the tight grab of her new green army jacket under her arms as she descended. It was not her jacket, really, but one she had stolen from the Goodwill truck that morning. Before that, it belonged to someone named Thompson or Thomas; the big black letters read "Thom," but the rest had been scraped away by nervous fingers or too many washings. Babe thought about this Thompson/Thomas, whether he was fat or thin, long-haired or short. She inhaled the material to see if she could detect the scent of another body, but all she smelled was the musky odor of smoke. In the distance, a black ball, like a roll of dirty cotton, hung in the sky. "There have always been fires and there will always be fires," Delia announced frantically, drawing her wet fingers through her hair. "People survive them. Most people do." "The fire is nowhere near us," Babe said, climbing up the ladder with the full bucket. "On TV they said it won't even jump the break." "Unless the winds change. We should have started hours ago." "We don't even own this dump," Babe said wearily. "Why are we trying to save it?" "We've got first and last and a deposit in it. This house is our bank account, Baby. This is all we've got." Babe heaved the bucket onto the roof. Water splashed over her, raining down on the ground below. Her mother shrieked and lifted her flowered skirt high above her knees. Deep purple veins traveled up and down her dark thighs, varicose reminders of her age and her pregnancy, sixteen years before. Still, her body moved like a dancer's, with a fluency that eluded Babe's own rounded, ungraceful figure. People often commented on Delia's fragile beauty—like a flower, they said, or a china doll. Unable to find her imprint in her mother's face or body, Babe imagined she must resemble her father, but she would never know this for sure; he'd left before Babe was born. She collected photographs of every place she and her mother had lived in, keeping them in an antique box—the only thing of real value they owned. But there were no photographs of this man. Babe tilted the nearly empty bucket over her head, rubbing the remaining water on her face and smearing her red lipstick onto her hands. She had spent her first few teenage years hiding her outsized mouth and full lips behind her hand or by keeping her shoulders hunched and her head down. But since moving to Los Angeles, where beauty assaulted her everywhere she looked, she had decided to wear only the boldest colors she could find on discount. Her skin was pale, and when she rimmed her eyes with dark kohl, and wore her red or purple or sometimes even black lipsticks, her ugliness became a challenge. Kids kept their distance. This was the way she liked it. Dripping with water, she pulled her damp shirt away from her chest. She smelled of the mingled odors of sex, Rockport's skin, and his Goodwill truck she'd been in only hours earlier, straddling his skinny, naked body. She'd worn the army jacket and nothing else.
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He'd said "I love you" which only meant he was done. So Babe rolled off him onto a mound of mildewed clothes. He tried to finish her off with his hand while she stared into the gunmetal-gray truck ceiling. First and second period were over and if she came quickly, she could sneak into study hall without anybody noticing she was late. But even though she tried thinking about climbing a mountain, then about a sleazy film she'd seen on late-night cable, nothing happened. "Forget it," she said, slipping out from beneath him. His concave chest and narrow hips accentuated her own broadness, although she was the healthier-looking of the two. His skin was tinged with gray. She often wondered if he ever left his truck at all. She knew nothing about him except that he was thirty-two years old, her mother's age. She didn't even know his whole name. "I gotta get out of here," she announced. "Give me a rag or something. Something clean." He pulled a plaid cotton shirt from the bed of clothes beneath him and held it up to her. "There's a secret history to this shirt" he mused. "Think of its life, what it's seen." "It's a fucking shirt," she snapped, grabbing it from him and pushing it between her legs. "Are you a freak?" she added. "Am I fucking a retard?" He smiled as he stood up to get his half-empty beer can from the back of the truck. His penis, long and half swollen, dangled between his legs. Babe turned away. The bodies of men embarrassed her, and she often rushed into sex to avoid having to look at them. With her eyes closed and her head buried in someone's neck, she could almost convince herself she was alone. She stood up and began to dress. "You're beautiful," he said, coming towards her with his beer. "Liar," she said, repulsed by the idea that she had, once again, allowed him inside her body. He lay back down on his mattress of discarded clothes, his head nested in his crossed arms. The sparse tufts of black hair in his armpits looked like flowers after a nuclear holocaust. She sucked in her stomach in order to button her tight jeans, then cinched her belt so her flesh plumped over the sides. "I'm here all week," he said, smiling up at her. "Then I'm in Sunland for I don't know how long." "Then I probably won't see you. I have things to do" She enjoyed the look of uncertainty that flashed across his face but her pleasure quickly soured into disgust. His need repulsed her. She felt this conflict of desires too when he stroked her with his long, lean fingers, as if she were something worth touching. It made her want to scream. "It's so easy to make boys love you," she said. "All you have to do is spread your legs."
By the time Babe and her mother had circled the entire house with the ladder and bucket, the section of roof they had watered first was nearly dry. This fact only encouraged Delia's growing panic. Babe knew the fire was a confirmation of everything her mother feared: that the world was an unwelcoming place, and that their life was barely hinged to its periphery. As far as Babe could tell, her mother lived tautly, waiting for the next deliverance of bad luck. When it arrived, she met it with equal degrees of astonishment and resignation. Delia had become obsessed by disaster, fearing the mud slides, quakes, and fires which afflicted the city like recurring diseases. She lived with the daily assumption that something terrible would happen, an expectation so fierce it bordered on hope. Babe was surprised that her mother had chosen to move to this city at all. But Delia was worn out from failing in so many cold and lightless midwestern cities. Los Angeles held out the possibility of paradise. "Can you smell it, Baby?" Delia called up the ladder, her voice constricted by fear. "I'd rather die than wait like this. I'd rather die and get it over with." "I don't smell anything," Babe said evenly, although she did—the air had filled up with the fire's sweet scent. Still, she had to remain calm in the face of her mother's rising anxiety. She climbed down the ladder and repositioned it under the next dry patch of roof. "Fill a bucket," she commanded. "Twenty-five houses have been consumed. Think of those poor people, Baby. They have nothing left. Can you imagine? Baby, can you?" "Don't freak out on me, Mother. I'm not kidding." "I won't," Delia whimpered apologetically and carried the full bucket back to the ladder. "Cross my heart." "Let's keep going," Babe said, hoping that, if she could keep her mother focused, Delia might not have one of her fits. Her mother called them "episodes," as if they were television shows, momentarily transfixing but instantly forgettable. Babe was unable to forget. First came a .low, wandering drone that Babe almost always mistook for a hurt animal until she located it coming from deep within her mother's chest. Next, Delia's eyes would fasten on some nonspecific place in the room, as if the world had consolidated into a fraction of air. Babe would call out, but her mother would not respond. If Babe tried to bring Delia out of her trance by touching her, she'd get no reaction at all. She'd have to wait—seconds, if the fit was mild; minutes, if it was not. Finally, the hum would subside and Delia would fall into a deep, childlike sleep. Babe would stand vigil nearby, afraid to turn on the television for fear of waking her mother, scared her mother might not wake at all. She'd make halfhearted attempts at cleaning the kitchen or straightening the living room—activities she would normally avoid. The rest of the time, she would sit on Delia's bed and watch the slow, twitching breaths quiver across her mother's chest. Delia's fits were always followed by a state of temporary amnesia. Waking, she would forget the fit, her name, even the name of her own daughter. It was up to Babe to remind her mother of their life. She would take old photographs out of her box and describe the many places they had lived. But in all her recollections, she omitted the memories that haunted her dreams. She did not remind her mother of the apartment in St. Louis where Babe, age eight, had waited alone each night for her mother to return from her job at a bar, her alertness her only defense against the intruders she was certain lurked outside the door. Neither did she tell her mother that the man photographed steadying Babe on a pony in Muncie was also the one who slipped into bed beside her one night, exploring her body until she bit him. Instead, Babe told of their visit to a gem cave on the way from Missouri to Ohio, or about the giant crab-shaped crab house somewhere in New England. Finally, Delia's face would brighten with recognition. "You're an amazing girl," she would say to Babe as she emerged from her oblivion, fresh and hopeful as a newborn. "You remember everything." A doctor's diagnosis in St. Louis: panic disorder. The cure: tranquilizers Delia complained about and quickly lost. So the fits continued, each one signaling a time to move on. Soon after one, they would pack their belongings, place the key under the doormat, avoiding landlords or unsatisfied lovers, and leave. "Forget everything that's ever happened to you," Delia would tell Babe as they drove towards their next home. "Your life begins now."
When Babe finished emptying the last bucket of water onto the roof, she went inside the house. The television was on and Delia was pulling a large red suitcase down from the closet shelf. "We're going to have to evacuate," Delia said, lowering the case to the floor. "Says who?" "Just look at the TV." Babe watched the screen as a house crumbled underneath the weight of flames. "Carbon Canyon," a newscaster's voice intoned "Consumed." "That's miles away," she sighed, sitting heavily on the worn couch. The phone rang and Delia gasped as she answered, as if expecting the fire to announce itself on the other end of the line. But when her voice mellowed, Babe knew that one of the mothers was calling. "Are you holding the baby in the football position?" Delia said slowly. "Did you ram his head onto your boob?" She listened for a few moments. Delia worked as a lactation consultant, renting breast pumps out of her car and administering advice to nursing mothers. Babe was astonished that her mother was trusted by people she hardly knew. "Keep trying," Delia continued, gently. "Don't cry. Of course you're a good mother." As she listened to the soothing patter, Babe's neck and jaw grew tight. She had to suppress the urge to scream or grab the phone and fling it at her mother. She turned over on her stomach and found a pen buried between the cushions. She wrote her name in small precise letters on the palm of her hand, pressing hard so that the skin became white and bloodless. She considered writing Rockport's name next to her own, maybe enclosing both within a heart. But she knew the emotions she had for him were not love, and that someone who encouraged such feelings of disgust and petulant wanting did not love her either.
She met Rockport six months earlier when she dropped items off at his Goodwill truck. Her garbage bag was full of things Delia had not been able to sell—snow boots from St. Louis, an Indians hat from their months in Cleveland, a pair of black patent-leather Mary Janes with worn-down heels. Since the Goodwill truck was parked only a block from Babe's high school, it had been up to her to drop off the bag. Her plan was to deliver the bag, cut school, and patrol the mall until two-thirty. She'd thumb a ride up the canyon when it was time to go home. When Rockport first appeared at the gate of the truck, Babe thought he was the ugliest man she'd ever seen. His face was thin, his eyes watchful and untrusting. Acne scars ran down each cheek, unpitying souvenirs of childhood. "Anything edible?" he said, opening the trash bag. She thought she had surprised a scavenger and looked at his hands, expecting them to be dirty and ravaged. Instead, his fingers were long and delicate, his nails the color of chalk. "No," she said, confused. "Are you hungry?" He smiled knowingly, then upended the bag onto the bed of the truck. "Food carries bacteria. Bacteria makes disease. Goodwill is in the business of helping people, not sending them to their graves." She watched, horrified, as a pair of her old cotton underpants fell out last, a splotch of faded red hearts landing on top of the great polyglot pile. "We're not picky at the Goodwill," he said, noticing the direction of her gaze. "You think the people who get your panties care whose ass was in them first?" She wanted to leave but he offered her a beer. She took his hand and climbed into the dark interior of the truck, where a radio, hot plate, mattress, and a green BarcaLounger combined into a makeshift home. The order of his belongings surprised her. Shoes rested in boxes, shirts were folded neatly on top of a milk crate. When he turned away to get her drink, she looked closely at a pile of books stacked in the corner. She picked up a ragged paperback with a drawing of a heavily armored, big-busted alien on its cover. "I hate science fiction," she said, tossing the book onto the mattress. "The past and the future are the only places where your life can really happen," he said, handing her the beer. "Bullshit. Your life can't happen in the past." "This is where you're wrong. You can reinvent yourself in your memories. You could say you were anyone. Who would know?" She eyed him warily. "You're not some crystal freak, are you?" she asked. He laughed, the creases on his face deepening. "No. I just have a lot of time on my hands. It's good to have a visitor." "I'm not a visitor. I don't even know you." "Would you like to?" "That's lame," she said, grinning despite herself. "Well, would you?" "No." The first time they had sex, he did not have a rubber, so he pulled out of her. He asked her to finish him off with her hand, but she said no. What he wanted made her uncomfortable and required a kind of intimacy she could not bear. She'd been having sex for two years and had slept with four different boys. They were often drunk and did not so much touch her as wash over her like indistinct waves. The sex was fast and practical and the boys always seemed surprised when they realized it was over. Their astonishment gave Babe a sense of power: she could get a boy off and do it quickly. Sex was the very first thing she was good at.
"Babe!" Delia cried, waking Babe, who sat up on the couch groggily, surprised that she had drifted off. Her mother stared at the television, holding a hand over her mouth. A woman reporter in a yellow slicker gesticulated wildly in front of a ball of fire which twisted on the ground like a whirl of leaves. When Babe looked closely, the fire turned out to be a burning dog. The animal performed a frenzied dance as it attempted to knock off the cape of flames. Finally, a fireman threw himself on top of the animal until the fire was extinguished. The dog lay, charred and motionless, on the ground. "It's dead," Delia whimpered. Her eyes dropped from the screen until they fixed on the carpet below. "Let's check the roof," Babe said automatically, trying to keep her mother from slipping into the vortex of her fears. "Get the flashlight. Mom, can you hear me?" "Yes," her mother answered faintly. "In the closet, Mom. Go. Now." Outside, Delia tried to light Babe's way to the roof, but her anxiety made her inattentive. Babe climbed the ladder, searching for rungs in the dark. Reaching the top, she found the shingles were dry. The smoky hot air entered her nostrils, constricting her throat and chest. She realized the fire was close, and that her efforts were useless now. She looked out across the canyon. A dusty haze obscured the new moon, leaving not darkness, but a vacancy of light. The trees stood still in the windless air. Suddenly a dull, dense sound of encroaching thunder rose up out of the woods and converged on the yard. The noise became deafening when a herd of deer, barely visible in the darkness, burst out of the trees and raced across the lawn. Their movement created a wind so strong that the ladder swayed underneath Babe. She hugged the shingles and felt the vibration of hooves penetrate her chest. Delia's flashlight gleamed over the animals' dark bodies. Babe could see the shiny wetness of their eyes, and how they moved with a mindless will, as though someone had given them the signal to run, but had not told them where to, or why. The silence that followed the animals' disappearance was expectant and dangerous. Somewhere inside its vastness rose Delia's wandering hum. Babe worked quickly. She sat her mother in the Toyota, then ran back into the house, where she threw clothes into a suitcase, grabbed the box of photos and her mother's purse, and dragged everything back outside. The news reports had warned of looters roaming the abandoned hills, so she left the lights and TV on. She piled everything into the trunk of the car and started to drive. Once off their small street, they joined the slow line of vehicles moving down the main road of the canyon. Motorcycles darted in and out between cars, stealing ahead in line and causing anxious drivers to honk their horns. Dogs rode unchained in the beds of trucks, trapped between suitcases and boxes overflowing with hastily collected possessions. Sirens wailed, signaling the imminent approach of fire engines, but when they appeared, they inched their way up the crowded, winding road, slow as toys. "On the news, they're going to be talking about how many people died," Delia said, bunching and unbunching the material of her dress. "They're going to be saying `Twenty people died,' or `Fifty people died.'" "Calm down, Mom," Babe said, her stomach tightening as she noticed the work of her mother's hands. "Let's sing," Delia said. She tapped her foot quickly on the floorboards. "Something we both know. Think, Baby. I can't remember a thing." "A, my name is Alice ..." Babe began, recalling the endless chant that had eased the boredom of their cross-country drives, "... and my husband's name is—" "Albert!" "We live in Albany, and we sell—" "Alfalfa!" Babe drove carefully around a stopped car which had been driven partway off the road and abandoned. A hundred feet ahead, a family walked down the canyon road. The parents carried suitcases. The children, wearing their colorful school backpacks, clasped stuffed animals and blankets to their chests. When an emergency worker in an orange vest tried to direct the family back to its forsaken car, the father pushed him away with such violence that the man fell onto the pavement. "B, my name is—" "Bonnie!" Delia said, pounding out the beat of the rhyme on the dashboard with her fist. Forty-five minutes later, they reached the bottom of the canyon. The road was a fairground of flashing red and yellow emergency lights. People ran in all directions, shouting orders into the night. The northbound side of the street was blocked off, so Babe followed the line of cars going the other direction. Twenty minutes later, they arrived in the parking lot of her school. They parked and entered the gym, which was set up as a temporary shelter. Delia clutched her purse and the box of photographs, Babe carried the suitcase and a breast pump, which, in her haste, she had pulled from the trunk of the car. "This is where you play your sports?" Delia said distractedly. She had only been to the registration office at the school once in order to sign Babe's transfer forms. (Continues...)
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BABE IN PARADISE