Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (3 page)

Randall turns to Maxon, says “Check the contributors list, find a dentist. Get little brother there this week.” To Dale: “We're going to buy you some new choppers.”

“I want to pay for them myself,” Dale says.

“That is an honorable thing. We'll find a way for you to do that.”

“Black cat.”

“What?”

“Black cat rhymes with ‘that.' I'm just working stuff in my head is all.”

“You have to say it out loud?”

“You need to loosen up, Buttercup.”

Randall considers responding, but realizes there is not much upside. If Dale can confine his anti-social tendencies to compulsive poeticizing, they will all be lucky.

Dale is slumped in the backseat, eyes closed, counting the minutes to Palm Springs, when he feels the car turning. They cross over the railroad tracks and into the town of Mecca. When Dale opens his eyes he sees a gas station just across the tracks and a
groceria
. Beyond that an auto parts shop and combination billiard hall/video arcade. Laid out on a grid, the town of Mecca evokes the other side of the solar system, as far from the well-irrigated green belt that runs from Palm Springs to Rancho Mirage to Indio as the Earth is from Saturn's Rings. Everyone on the streets, a woman in front of her house, a girl waiting for a bus, a man standing by the open hood of a beat-up Toyota pickup, looks Mexican.

“What are we doing here?” Dale asks.

“Got you a place,” Randall says. “Friend of mine built some units down here. Clean, new, got the wheelchair access.”

“In Mecca?” Dale does not sound pleased.

“You can't afford Palm Springs yet, little brother.”

“You want to tell me what I'm supposed to do when I'm down in Mecca Town? Wanna mess around . . . bring my peoples down . . . ”

“Stay out of trouble, that's what.”

Dale slumps deeper into the backseat, his poetic verve evaporating. Randall looks up from his BlackBerry. “Who's this Desert Machiavelli guy, you think?”

“The blogger?” Maxon asks. “Damned if I know.”

 

S
unlight fires from under a drawn plastic shade and lights the interior of a mountainside mobile home. Tropical fish drift past swimming east and west in a variegated palette of hues. They are on Jimmy's plasma screen television, a continuous silent loop that he plays when whatever is available for his viewing pleasure annoys him. This is most of the time. What he had enjoyed most about the fish when he purchased the DVD on which they swim was that he didn't need to feed them or clean their tank. It was right after his wife had left and the video fish were all the companionship he wanted. But he has come to appreciate the sense of meditative calm with which they move. Looks at his watch. Is it already nearly ten o'clock? That means he actually fell asleep at some point last night, which provides him with a fleeting moment of happiness.

Rising from the couch, Jimmy steps over a maze of Chinese takeout containers and Mountain Dew empties and pads over the fraying Navajo rug into the bathroom. No one's around, so he leaves the door open behind him. He's achy this morning, his muscles sore. Insomnia has plagued him his whole life and right now he feels as if he hasn't slept in a month.

The trailer is a two bedroom with a kitchenette. Nothing on the white walls, a maroon couch—the color selected for its ability to conceal stains—a table, and two chairs.
Two
chairs. That day at Ikea, Jimmy was optimistic. Figured why decorate? He's going to be renting for only a month. That was a year ago. Darlene had told him the marriage was over. He stayed drunk for a week.

Here he is in the mirror. Sick of looking like a mug shot. Runs warm water, lathers his face, shaves. There. That's good. No, it's not. But it's a start. Today, he thinks, is going to be a good day.

“Right, Bruno?” he says to the German shepherd sleepily eyeing him. Bruno stirs himself from his mottled plaid bed, gets to his feet and performs a downward facing dog. Jimmy opens the door of the trailer and lets him out.

After he measures out the coffee, a dark Sumatra that buzzes him at one and a half cups, Jimmy sits at his kitchen table and waits for it to brew. In front of him is a photo album
.
His anger management counselor, an overweight guy with ginger hair, a bald spot, and a wispy voice that made Jimmy want to wring his neck, had suggested that as part of his work-mandated therapy, he focus on something he loves. They bantered back and forth about it and after Jimmy had said beer and pizza, and the other members who were taking it more seriously got on his case, he admitted a soft spot for dogs. Not little yappy ones, but big Labs and Ridgebacks, St. Bernards and Akitas. Stan, a black guy with the body of a weightlifter, suggested he cut out pictures of dogs from magazines and make a scrapbook. “Calm your shit right down,” Stan assured him as he described the one he was doing with a sailboat theme. The idea struck Jimmy as hopelessly insipid but the next day he went to a crafts store and purchased a forest green faux-leather photo binder. Jimmy didn't want to cut pictures out with a scissor and glue them into some scrapbook. What he would do: photograph the dogs he encounters with the camera in his cell phone, feed the pictures into his laptop, print them and place them in his book. It would serve not only as a means of calming himself, but also as a record of his various days. Jimmy had taken a strip of duct tape and placed it across the cover of the book. With a sharpie he had scrawled
BOOK OF DOGS.
He would stop anywhere he saw one—an arthritic Lhasa Apso on a Palm Springs sidewalk, a matted Collie in a tourist's station wagon, a chained pit bull in a fenced desert yard—and ask the owner if he could take the dog's picture for his book. Usually they didn't mind. The project has been extant for little more than a month and Jimmy already has pictures of nearly two-dozen breeds.

He's on his second cup of the Sumatra looking at a photograph of a Jack Russell terrier that belongs to a robbery victim he had questioned the week before he was busted from the force when his cell phone chirps. He's not happy to hear it. He wants to crush it under his heel. The anger. Still working on it. Maybe he should buy a ringtone. Something by Willie Nelson. Can't be pissed off when you hear that voice.

“Why didn't you show the flag this morning, Jimmy Ray?” Randall asks. “Don't you remember our brother?”

“Overslept.” Jimmy used to wish he had different siblings. He eventually amended that to wishing he was an only child. He appreciated Randall intervening when he had some trouble at work, but whenever he saw him, and recently it hasn't been often, he always found the man too concerned about the family “brand.” And when he thought about Dale, well, that was pleasant like an aneurism.

“Would have been good to get a picture of the three of us. He's out now, remember?” Randall still with an edge. Jimmy tells him he remembers, in a tone that adds: and perhaps the state is making a big mistake, without actually saying the words. What he says is: “Thank god he'll be home for Christ­mas,” and assumes Randall will recognize the joke.

But if Randall wants to parse the nuance contained in Jimmy's inflection, he gives no indication of that. “Can you do me a favor and look in on him? You got that key I sent you, right? The one to the condo I got him?” Jimmy grunts an affirmative reply, then overcome by an atavistic need to discomfit his brother, says “So, Randall, I was at that Mary Swain rally yesterday.”

“Yeah, why?”

Jimmy can sense his brother's annoyance crackling through the phone. “She is Szechuan hot.”

Randall says, “Just be sure come Election Day you vote for the family business,” and clicks off. It amuses Jimmy that his brother doesn't remember he moved out of the district when his marriage broke up.

After the second cup of coffee he places his meditation cushion on the living room floor, sets a timer, then sits cross-legged and for the next twenty minutes observes his increasingly bothersome thoughts. How can anyone sit on a cushion, he wonders, and not have their heads explode from the overwhelming nature of their inner phantasmagoria?

Rises and stretches his legs. It's torture for him to sit and do nothing but he's learning there is something to be said for observing what arises and then doing absolutely nothing other than watching it pass. Lets Bruno back in the trailer, refills his dog bowl with water. Maybe he'll actually follow through on Randall's suggestion and sprinkle some sunshine on Dale's life.

 

http://WWW.DESERT-MACHIAVELLI.COM

10.30 – 11:15
A.M.

The Machiavelli had the cockles of his cynical heart warmed when he turned on the TV and saw coverage of Randall Duke greeting his brother when he was released from prison. It was like some kind of bizarro Hallmark hallucination, the slick pol with the gimpy jailbird. Randall obviously thinks this is going to get him some votes since he hasn't done anything out of the goodness of his heart his entire life. And Dale is a serious piece of damaged work, a scumsucker who wasn't due to be paroled for another year. Nice to know the law treats us all equally. Of course, you Blogheads are aware the Machiavelli has occasionally been known to side with the criminal element—especially where crimes of vice are concerned—but he does not like the cut of Dale Duke's jib. The Machiavelli has not made up his mind about this election yet. Under normal circumstances, he would never vote for an empty suit like Randall Duke—he voted for the Vegan Party candidate in the last election an hour after eating a cheeseburger, rather than pull the lever for that vacuous twit—but his opponent the Stewardess is more suited to model on the cover of
Gun Nut
than to be a Representative in the United States Congress. Not to be an elitist snob and taking nothing away from her pretty legs, but did the Stewardess even graduate from college?

 

 

I
n a slim cut black wool blazer—consciously chosen for its length which covers her burgeoning backside yet still hangs in a way that does not invite comparisons to a table top—a loose white button-front blouse, maroon leggings and knee high soft black leather boots with a low heel, her layered, expensively dyed blond hair covered by a faded raspberry golf cap with the logo
Life Is Good
, Kendra Duke is a picture of slightly overweight chic. In most of America she would be a bikini model but she knows the standards in Palm Springs are not those of the great white flour and sugar consuming non-coastal areas of the republic.

A shopping expedition has delivered her to Couture Canyon Apparel where the wide, well-organized racks of designer clothes are arranged in pleasure-inducing geometry. This store is the bargain basement province of Kendra's favorite designers whose overpriced creations command considerably more in the gilded precincts ninety miles to the west. On weekends the place is crammed with breathless Los Angeles bargain seekers rendered weak-kneed by the site of Versace reduced by a third, and the frenzied yanking of dresses and jackets off racks, the impatient lines outside the changing rooms, turn the place into Cairo at rush hour, but on this weekday morning it is as quiet as a chapel.

She notices one other shopper, a trim older man with a full head of steel gray hair wearing a well-cut white linen suit as he examines a display of Prada shirts.

This morning Kendra's brief is a specific one: to shop for something to wear on Election Day, Day of Days, Judgment Day in Duke World, one week from today, when she will be photographed and videotaped, recorded for posterity yet again as a human corsage, an appendage of Congressman Randall Duke. An appendage! That was definitely not the plan back in her twenties when she was ten pounds lighter and considerably more dewy when it came to the machinations of the universe.

Against the wall opposite the entrance is an enticing rack of Dolce and Gabbana and Kendra zeroes in. Scoping the selection with a practiced eye, she pulls two outfits off the rack—a green double-breasted skirt suit with a half-sleeved blouse and a silver lurex quilted Jacquard dress—and finds a changing room. Even with outlet mall pricing, both selections are over two thousand dollars, but Kendra believes she deserves a treat and does not think Randall will take exception to this. Assuming he wins the election. The way he has been talking about Mary Swain the past few weeks has her worried.

Strutting out of the dressing room barefoot, Kendra heads for a full-length mirror. The suit is flattering. Probably because it's a size 10, and so what if its only worn once. She pivots from the mirror and glances over her shoulder at her reflection. Not bad for a forty-two year old woman, she thinks. Despite the suet in her sway, she is not lacking in confidence. Kendra was a drum majorette with the marching band at the University of Southern California—where she graduated
cum laude
in communications—and still comports herself like someone accustomed to twirling a baton in front of eighty thousand football fans at the Rose Bowl. Whenever Kendra looks at herself in a full-length mirror, which is several times a day, she strikes a subtle performance pose. Sometimes it is entirely subconscious and she catches herself doing it, but it does not embarrass her. A former professional singer and lover of the bright lights, she is haunted in small ways by their absence from her life. This is the signal element in the difficulty she has with her marriage. Any successful politician is a performer, a hoarder of whatever oxygen is in the immediate environment, and this leaves Kendra the songbird gasping for air. Her singing career, though never particularly successful, supplied enough of this attention to afford her an independent identity. Since it's eclipse by her role as Mrs. Randall Duke, there has been nothing to replace it: not her husband, who is permanently distracted in the manner of anyone who is perpetually running for office, and not her teenaged daughter who is far more interested in separating from the family then giving her mother the slightest bit of attention.

Back in the dressing room, Kendra slips out of the skirt suit and tries on the quilted Jacquard dress. She tilts her head down and smiles, then looks at her face: adorable. Feeling exhilarated she twirls around and hikes the back of the dress revealing a well-formed if slightly-too-large ass bisected by a white silk thong, and a four-inch high manga kitten tattooed on her left buttock. She had regretted getting the tattoo a day after having it done, but right now she loves the sass it provides and almost wishes someone were watching her.

Out on the floor of the cavernous store, Kendra pirouettes in front of the mirror. She adores the dress. It is less conservative than the skirt suit, does not scream politician's wife, but she worries Randall will find it too flash. The downside of these kinds of outlet stores, these massive retailing barns that traffic in manufacturing miscalculations, is the absence of doting salespeople. Kendra would appreciate some doting right now. This is a woman who sang for thousands of people in her career—although, to be clear, not at the same time—and now the only noise is the low drone of the straining air conditioning.

There was a time she believed she would remain a performer for the rest of her life. What had changed? While appearing with a Seventies revival band at a county fair outside of Fresno Kendra had met a law student named Randall Duke. Spotting her eating a candy apple in the food tent, he told her he loved the way she sang
Mandy.
As pickup lines went, she had heard far better but Randall was persistent, and not without charm. That day he purchased five copies of
Disco Lady
, her self-released CD—the cover of which featured Kendra at the wheel of a Ford Pinto—for gifts, and when they married a year later Kendra reluctantly gave up her career, with the understanding that it would resume when the children they intended to have were no longer young.

“What do you think?” Kendra looks to her left and sees the speaker, a beautiful woman in a pale yellow Valentino suit. The hemline stops just above her knee and her calves are spectacular. A Panama hat pulled low. Large dark sunglasses. Her presentation is that of a glamorous spy in a Hollywood movie and she looks vaguely familiar to Kendra. The woman smiles at her, showing a set of perfect porcelain teeth. “My husband is over there, but I'd rather get a girl's opinion.”

Kendra glances toward the older man in the white linen suit on the other side of the store. He's looking at a rack of summer-weight bespoke jackets. “That outfit looks totally great on you,” Kendra says.

“Don't you love shopping here in the morning before everything is picked through?” Her tone is friendly, confiding, the voice warm. If the woman were not with her husband Kendra would consider asking if she wants to get coffee.

Kendra strikes a pose with her dress. “Be honest,” she tells her new friend with the stylish hat and big sunglasses.

The woman puts her right hand to her chin, supporting her elbow with her opposite hand—perfect manicure!—and considers Kendra's presentation.

“Your husband's gonna love it.” Kendra wonders how the woman knows she's married. Looks at her ring finger, sees the diamond, oh . . . right, that. “You look familiar,” the woman says, and Kendra's heart does a two-step. A fan?

“I used to be a singer.”

“Really? What's your name?”

“Kendra Kerry. I sang all over the west coast with a seventies revival band. Maybe you saw me somewhere.”

The woman studies her for a moment. “No, no, somewhere else. Well, I've got to get going. Thanks for giving me your opinion. Us girls have to stick together, right?”

“Definitely,” Kendra says.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to introduce myself,” the woman says. “I'm Mary Swain and I'm running for Congress. I'd love to have your vote.”

Oh, no, no, no. The hat, the large sunglasses, the whole incognito posture. If Kendra had been less distracted she would have noticed. And now Mary Swain has made this ridiculous request. Mary Swain had to have seen her somewhere with Randall. Did she create so little of an impression? “Sure,” Kendra says, in that instant when thinking would ordinarily take place.

“It was great meeting you, Kendra,” Mary Swain says. As she walks away, her taut, well-exercised form in recession is a ringing coda to the impression of perfection she leaves in her wake.

Kendra feels like she's been smacked in the face. The sensation is not sharp, but dull and resonant. She sees Mary Swain and her husband at the cash register now. Mary Swain
has
to know who she is. Has she been playing with her? Had she come over simply to enact some kind of sadistic spider and fly routine? Surely, whether or not she had seen Kendra sing at the Kern County State Fair is immaterial. The woman has to know she was talking to Randall Duke's wife. Surely, she has to have at least recognized her from pictures taken with Randall. There are some on the Randall Duke website, aren't there? She'll have to check later. She knows there haven't been any pictures of her in the newspapers lately, not that anyone reads them anyway, but still. Mary Swain had to have recognized Kendra somehow.
Had
to have. How utterly and resonantly humiliating! That she could present herself to Kendra as just a civilian shopper is appalling. Who does this plucked and toned shot of estro-power think she is? Kendra considers herself a force with which to be reckoned. For someone like Mary Swain to feel no compunction about standing in the middle of an outlet store and toying with her in this cat-with-a-clueless-mouse manner is unconscionable.

When she retreats to the dressing room, Kendra is distracted from these malign thoughts by her phone. The caller ID: Palm Springs Academy, the school her daughter Brittany attends. The female voice on the other end asks if this is Mrs. Duke. When Kendra answers in the affirmative, the caller identifies herself as Mrs. Halstead, the head of the Upper School, and informs her that her daughter Brittany has been caught sending nude pictures of herself over the Internet to a boyfriend which has resulted in a two day suspension effective immediately and would you mind terribly picking her up right now?