Crawlers (2 page)

2

Not quite three years later . . .

September 30

A balmy afternoon, the smell of pine resin; the smell of a basketball sitting in the sun.

Adair Leverton scooped up the basketball from the driveway, its rubber hot in her hands, and shot it at the hoop that leaned a little too much toward her on the portable backboard. Her mom had come out of the open garage with a flowerpot in her hand; her father glanced up from his workbench, where he was tinkering with the filter on his scuba gear. They both paused to watch Adair. The ball glanced off the backboard, rebounded into the hoop’s rim, spun around twice, and popped out.

Her mom put the empty flowerpot down and caught the ball on the rebound. She said, “I taught you better than to lay up with two hands like a girl, Adair.” And she jumped, laying the ball up for a basket with a flip of her right hand. Adair caught the ball as it slipped through the basket, and Mom jumped in to steal it as Dad watched, smiling with one side of his mouth, the way he did.

Mom was only half an hour back from a Saturday girls-track meet and still had her coach whistle whipping with her movements on its thong around her neck; still wore her tan shorts and white shirt and white tennies. She had narrow doelike features, long hair she called dishwater blond caught up on her head with a rawhide clasp—the residue of her hippie days.

Dad still had that little gray ponytail, though his hair was receding. His long, wind-reddened, weather-seamed face showed a hint of his youth, too, in that moment; he was working on something he loved, fine-tuning his salvage equipment, and he was with his kids on a sweet day—both kids because now Adair’s older brother Cal was driving up in Dad’s truck. LEVERTON SALVAGE on the truck’s doors, beginning to fade.

Cal took in the scene as he walked up, tugging up his droopy pants. He walked over to his dad, swiping the rebounding basketball, passing it over Adair’s head back to Mom. Adair squealed in mock outrage as Mom faked her out to the left, darted around her. “You got to be faster than that, Adair!”

“Oh, like I want to be a jock like you, Mom!” But Adair was grinning as she skillfully flicked the ball away from her mom’s hand.

“What you got going on?” Cal asked, looking over the gear spread out on the worktable beside the driveway. “That filter still choking up?”

“It needs to be replaced. I’ve got a contract for next weekend— sunk cabin cruiser. It’s only forty feet of water so they figure it might be worth it to raise her. Hull’s tight, so . . .”

Adair paused, glancing at her brother.

“A contract?” Cal looked at his dad hopefully—then looked away, hiding again. That’s how it seemed to Adair.

She passed the ball to her mom, who went to the imaginary free throw line to practice.

Dad had probably figured out what Cal was thinking. But Dad was in a good mood. He hadn’t been drinking for a good while; he’d been taking his antidepressants. And he was over being mad: Cal had gotten puking drunk one night, a few months earlier—and next day, hungover, he ran their boat aground on a sandbar. They’d had to be towed off, which cost money, and Dad had said Cal was too irresponsible to work with. Maybe Dad’s own drinking issues made him come down hard on Cal.

Cal hadn’t done any binge-drinking since, that Adair knew of. He acted as if what Dad thought didn’t matter to him. But she knew it mattered, big-time.

Blowing into the filter, Dad said, “You going to help me out, Cal? I’ll give you eight bucks an hour, best I can do.”

“Oh, God, Nick, you shouldn’t have to pay him,” Mom said, pausing with the ball in her hands. Catching her breath. These days, she was mostly a coach and not so much an athlete. “He lives with us. We feed him.” She shot the ball, missed. Adair caught the rebound.

“Hey, he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to be paid,” Dad said.

Adair bounced the basketball to her mom, watched her take a shot, and felt, for a moment, that maybe everything was going to be all right. She knew Mom was unhappy with her, though she’d never said so. Mom not liking Adair’s computer-art obsession, her interest in sharing art files over the Internet—like she thought Adair was secretly dealing in porn, or something. She’d felt like her mom wanted her to be more into feminism and athletics. Or become a teacher. Yeah, like her.

Zilch interest from Adair in teaching, and Mom had given out a faint but perpetual air of disappointment, until yesterday—when Mom’d seen her artwork in the digital-art show at the Youth Center. It was the best stuff there, and Mom had been proud. And today they were having fun together on Mom’s turf.

Cal and Dad were getting back together, and Dad was talking, and working, not in that black funk he’d been in for so long, when he’d been secretly drinking and plunking his guitar alone on his boat at two in the morning.

And she’d met a cool guy, Waylon, at school. He was a year ahead of her, a junior. He’d asked for her screen name so he could instant-message her, and they’d talked late last night on-line. Today was sunny, and birds were singing, and Mom was throwing her the ball again and smiling, and Dad was laughing at some story Cal was telling about what a spaced-out knucklehead his cousin Mason was.

And it was funny how things came together and came apart and came together again, in pulses, in patterns. But then, didn’t that mean that things would have to come apart again?

Or maybe something else was coming. Something new.

And for some reason, as she paused to take her free throw, she found herself staring at the sky.

November 19

On the night the light screamed in the sky, Adair was walking with Waylon Kulick, the two of them looking at the television shine in picture windows. Two teenagers looking for something to do on an unseasonably warm evening.

But if you didn’t have a car, and you lived where the mass transit was lame, you were stuck between the suburbs and the horse ranches, making it up as you went.

“What I like to do,” Waylon said, “is walk around at night and try to guess what people are watching on TV, just by the lights you see in their windows.”

He said it in a nervous way, like he was wondering,
Will she think
I’m a geek?

“How do you do that?” Adair asked. They were walking down Pinecrest Street, which meandered along the little defile between Pinecrest Ridge and the high, deer-trammeled grassy hills of the protected watershed.

Adair took the little glow tube out of her mouth and looked at it lighting up the palm of her hand in soft green. It was a souvenir from the rave her big brother had taken her to—glowing like the TV lights in the living room windows.

Waylon glanced at it. “That’s hella weird shit, people putting glow sticks in their mouths and little blinking things in their ears at raves.”

“I know. And vibrators in their pockets.” She tossed the little light-stick in the air and watched him effortlessly catch it. Good hand-eye coordination.

Waylon was tall, too, and leanly muscular, but she was guessing he wasn’t a team type. Too bad: the Quiebra Cougars could’ve used the help on the basketball court.

He was cute, all right, though it was a bit spoiled by the perpetual scowl, the harshness of a pig-shave haircut relieved only by a few Day-Glo blue spikes; just now they seemed to go with the light-stick.

He held the small light-stick up between two fingers to watch it glow against the backdrop of the night. It was the color of cemetery fox fire.

Just to see how he’d react, she said, “Ooh, yuck. It’s still got my spit on it.”

He permitted himself a brief grin. “Gross. Here, take it back with your, like, DNA samples all over it. That came from a rave? We didn’t have any raves where I lived in New York. They got some on Long Island, I heard, over by the Sound, but we were alla way upstate.”

Adair found herself looking around—unsure what she was looking for. It was like she could feel the night itself, waiting for something, and that made her wait for it, too.

Mostly she looked over her shoulder, at the sky. She could see lots of stars, out here, since there weren’t really enough streetlights.

Something else is coming.
She could definitely feel it.

It wasn’t like she was psychic; she never really knew what was going to happen. But sometimes—maybe once or twice a year—a kind of
weight
was in the air, a feeling of bigness impending. The feelings weren’t frequent. But now and then, only that much, she’d feel something she could never identify till it happened:
Oh, that’s
what that feeling was about.

She’d felt something was going to happen the day before her dad had his breakdown. Sometimes—just sometimes—she could feel changes coming the way animals supposedly could feel a storm about to break.

She felt a tightening right now. It was like the night air was something you could roll onto a spindle, stretch it up like a guitar string, tighter and tighter.

“What you lookin’ at?” he said, following her gaze into the sky.

“Nothing.” What
was
she looking for? She didn’t know. “Um, you glad your mom moved to California?”

“I don’t know, ask me after I’ve been here more’n a month.” He stared off into the dark hills. Adding, “I can’t see my dad much, living out here.” He seemed to realize he’d exposed himself a little, and blurted a change of subject. “And I mean, fuck,
Quiebra, California,
it’s sort of embarrassing—”

“Oh, thanks, my town is all embarrassing!”

“Just the name. Quiebra. It’s, like, Spanish for queer-bait.”

She snorted, not quite laughing. “Don’t say that at school, you’ll get your butt kicked.”

“Ooh, I’m all scared of that. What the fuck’s that mean,
Quiebra
?”

“I think it means like broken or . . . a crack in the ground or something. It has to do with they had an earthquake once, in this area, when the Spanish people were here, like before the white people, and there was a big ol’ earthquake crack formed the first day they were here.”

“Oh, great. Now I live in a town named after a fucking crack in the ground. What’s Spanish for
butt crack
?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ex-
cuse
me? Um, shut
up
?”

“Earthquakes, huh. Hey, where’s the earthquake crack?”

Adair shrugged. “Gone, I
guess
, probably. Filled up. I think it was over in the next town anyway, probably, in Pinole. Anyway, we’re closer here to San Francisco than you were to New York City. We’re right across the bay. San Francisco is cool.”

“Yeah, right, the town of Queer-Bait across the bay from fucking
San Francisco
, home of gay parades and shit.”

But he said it in a way that made her smile, because he was laughing at himself as he said it. The familiar shade of irony people put on everything. You knew he was the kind of guy who could have a friend who was gay and maybe give him a little shit about it, but neither of them taking it seriously. That’s why she liked him, and almost trusted him.

He was the kind of guy who’d make fun of Latino people sometimes, too—but she’d seen him be really nice to Suzie Jalesca, who was Mexican and a flagrant lesbo, and you could tell it was the way he really felt about it: Like there was an obligation to make fun of people of every kind. Make fun of them for being trailer-park whites, ghetto gangbangers, low-rider cholos, white Republican drones, knee-jerk liberals, computer nerds, football fanatics, gays, whatever. Just make fun of them all because that made them all equal. People were more the same than different, and guys like Waylon knew that.

She looked at a TV light shining, blinking web-colored onto the darkened lawn of the house they were passing. “I’d like to do some photography of that . . . just get that glow.”

“You into cameras and shit?” It was a gruff way of asking, but he seemed really interested.

“Yeah, I took an after-school class, and I’m sort of hooked on it. It’d be hard to do something like colored lights from a window at night—I mean, to get it the way it really should look. I’m still learning—and I’ve got a kind of half-assed Canon my mom got me for Christmas last year.”

“I always wanted to do that. Photography or movie cameras or something. I can play some guitar, is all.”

“My brother plays guitar. Not very good, but he plays. My dad used to sing, but he gave it up.” She tried to peer through the half-curtained picture window of a ranch-style house; past the small saguaro in a cactus garden and under a season flag that showed a simplified harvest cornucopia. “Huh. You can’t see the actual, like, TV sets most of the time. You can really tell what they’re watching from the glow?”

“Those people are watching
The Simpsons
reruns. I just saw some colors that means Bart threw something at Lisa.”

“You know too much about television. You should go on that show,
Beat the Geeks.
”

“It’s true,” he said. “My mom . . . watching TV’s about all we do together. Watch TV when she’s—”

He seemed about to say something more, but broke off. Another touchy area. But she knew what it was. Maybe they had something in common.

They came to a corner, followed it around till they were walking down Birdsong toward Owlswoop Avenue.

Quiebra was right on the edge of a wilderness preserve. The coyotes were somewhere near, hoping a fat, slow old cat would get restless enough to come up into the hills that crowded the street.

There were rattlers up there, too. They’d come down from the hills and canyons to ease soundlessly through the ivy between houses. Raccoons raided garbage cans, and there were so many horned owls some nights it sounded, Adair’s mom said, “like an owl convention.”

Adair smiled, seeing jack-o’-lanterns still on people’s porches, starting to sag like they were elderly people beginning to fall in on themselves. There was still a Halloween feeling in the air. The O’Haras still had their Halloween lawn scene up three weeks past the time. A life-size plastic skeleton hung from a noose tied to an ornamental plum tree branch, swaying and grinning. A ghost made of white polyester gently bobbed in the slightly growing breeze on a wire depending from a clothesline stretched from the roof to the tree. Rain-shredded black crepe still hung around the front door, with fake cobwebs and half a dozen rubber bats. Two big, wrinkled-up jack-o’-lanterns sat to either side of the porch step. There were gray-painted Styrofoam tombstones in the lawn, some of them knocked over. They had legends on them like, GEORGE DIED HAPPY, GEORGE DIED QUICK, TOO MUCH LIKKER’LL MAKE YOU SICK.