Theo (19 page)

Dad, can I get my hair cut like that.

Sure, mate.

Where’s Shelley. Theo remembers the presents. He wants his dad to kick a ball. Maybe if Theo played music more and got good at it his dad would listen to him more.

Theo’s dad’s grinning and slapping hands with the man with the mohawk, talking low, ducking heads together. The fountain people are all spraying the man who’s buried up to his chest, and he’s gleaming now and the sand’s chocolate brown, and Mingus sits cross-legged talking to one of the ladies, he’s touching her hand, reaching over to do it. Theo hears the words miracle and interval. The lady is nodding. She’s pretty. Theo feels funny.

Colin runs over wet, and he’s got a hunting knife stuck in the waist of the thing he’s wearing, and his eye-shadow is smeared down his face so he looks like a zombie or some of the people who come to the house sometimes who’ve just played a show, they wear make-up around their eyes and –

Where’s Shelley: Theo asks Adrian.

I hope you like her. I do. She had to go to work.

What work.

She’s a model. It’s sort of like acting, at least if all your character ever has to do is make faces. Anything beyond that gets dicey for most of them. Shelley’s not like that, though.

Let’s do it, Colin is saying, and the mohawk man is smiling.

Dallas is in town, he’s falling by later, Adrian says.

Outstanding, things are slowing to a crawl otherwise.

Adrian looks at Theo funny, and says, I gotta make sure Theo’s taken care of, I’m on me own here.

We can get somebody, Colin says.

Later, maybe: come on, son, Adrian says, let’s go eat.

Theo thinks, why do they talk so much. Why did Adrian say he was on his own if Colin’s right here. Why can’t they leave his dad alone: someone’s always pulling at him, wanting his attention or asking for something. And –

Come on, chop chop, my friend. I’m famished, let’s get those bangers, maybe Gus’ll join us. This walk is killing me. I feel like Lawrence in the desert.

Who’s Lawrence.

He was an Englishman who made a career in Arabia, marching across the burning sands dressed in curtains to ensure that Europe could have all the gasoline it needed. Let’s take a rest here.

Adrian sinks into crossed legs next to a cooler dropped away from everyone up the beach, opens it and clanks around in sweaty bottles, grabs something, a beer, rummages until he finds a bottle of Coke, a small baggie full of powder, a sandwich, which he hands to Theo: Allah be praised, it’s a miracle.

Then Adrian coughs, and coughs and keeps coughing until he’s gradually bending over the sand and Theo sees Frieda’s face.

Are you sick.

No, it’s just the cigarettes. I should cut back, shouldn’t I. Maybe you can help me.

Okay, sure. What do you want me to do.

When you see me getting ready to light one up, just say, memento mori.

What’s minto moray.

Memento mori.

What’s that mean.

It’s Latin. It refers to the grinning skull always breathing down your neck.

What’s that mean.

Adrian laughs, coughs a minute. It means, my friend – Adrian pushes his sunglasses up his face, and Theo notices he’s still holding the small baggie full of powder, which is kind of brownish white. It means, don’t smoke. Adrian laughs again. So right, you see me lighting up one of those death sticks, just say memento mori, dad.

Adrian’s still in his black underwear, his legs thin like Theo’s; piano legs Frieda called them.

Eat up, eat up, we’ve got to keep you fed, you’re growing like a weed. Adrian stands up on his spindly legs and moves back toward the water, tips the beer up. Budweiser. Adrian doesn’t like American beer but does like Budweiser. It’s tastelessness is distinctive, he says, like fugu or tofu. He calls it the pick of the litter.

I thought you were hungry, Theo says.

I don’t like to get filled up, have a pile of heavy food sit like a rock in your digestive system for hours. I like to eat but not a lot at a time, I think it’s healthier; it passes through you faster, doesn’t stay in one place too long. We’ll get something later. Where’s Gus, do you have any idea. He should be looking after you.

Theo’s chewing the sandwich, which is warm and just a slice of bright cheese on the white bread, no mayonnaise or mustard or anything. It gums up in his mouth. The Coke needs an opener, but there’s not one in the cooler.

Adrian, away, walks a little faster, bent over now holding something up to his face: the little bag, Theo remembers.

Theo bends over the cooler, full of beers and bags, but no ice. Everything’s warm. Little bags, and some have pills, red and green ones. Theo sees carved boxes; he’s seen these before, from North Africa, when they went to Morocco. Theo picks up a small box and opens it on pills that look like aspirin.

Theo closes up the cooler, stands. Adrian now sits in a circle of people under an umbrella, pink and white stripes, the edge rippling and whipping. The wind is stronger, and gulls stand on the sand, flock around the people, some of whom throw things at them or to them, hard to tell which. People walk on the beach, and Theo sees a jeep coming, the same one as earlier with the two police officers. One of the men in the circle under the umbrella stands; it’s one of the minders, Lev, he’s stepping over people and walking fast but casually toward the jeep, heading it off, he’s walking in front of it, so the jeep slows and turns, it has big eyes that stare at Theo, unblinking. A uniformed man gets out from behind each flapped door, and Lev smiles and holds out a hand.

Theo turns and runs back toward the house, over the desert, sharpness in his stomach now. He’s been around a lot of police at different times. Theo’s read about jail and seen movies and TV shows – one of his classmates waved around a magazine article about his dad. The article said a lot about drugs. Let’s bet, the kid said, and other kids started in on Theo, or on his dad, rather, saying I’ll bet he’s goes to jail this year. Then: Let’s bet on when someone will like you. Nobody likes you. Why doesn’t anybody like you. Something’s wrong with you. You’re like a girl. One kid’s father ran a bank, one took pictures of models. I want you to have a normal life, his mother said, go to a public school. Normal dusty trees rustled a little.

Theo grabbed the magazine and ran back into school from
the hot black playground, past the monitor lady always looking the wrong way and never seeing anything that happened. The teacher would be in the classroom at her desk, she never came out for recess, and Theo streaked to the janitor’s closet, where kids only temporarily hid things because the janitor drank alcohol in there and he wouldn’t tell but the thing would just be gone or thrown away, and Theo decided not to hide it there, and he started walking fast, in and out of other kids lining up in the hall and teachers counting and he walked close to the sign-in desk at the front door and kind of ducked to go past and pushed on the big bar of the front door and went down the steps and to one of the big prickly bushes next to the sidewalk blooming with empty cans and bottles and greasy napkins and platanos bags jammed in, and pushed the magazine into the bush, more weird fruit it produced, and then turned around and went back up the steps and kind of ducked again and ran this time down the hall, a couple of teachers saying no running, and Theo passed his class where the teacher was eating and reading, carefully not looking up, you could scream and yell or bang and she still wouldn’t look up during recess, and he went back out past the monitor lady and ran toward the monkey bars and found a spot where there weren’t any kids and pulled himself up and climbed until he sat at the top, next to another kid he didn’t know, from a different class, and the two of them sat up there not talking, on top of the tower, looking out over the chasing and playing and huddles of kids, the swirl and churning, waiting till someone made them come down, back to the planet earth.

Walking back toward the house under the beach sun Theo broils impatiently, he’s not a kid, and a lot of things he didn’t
notice before he notices now. Or, maybe he did notice, he thinks, as he remembers when he was eight and seven and six. He thinks maybe it’s just he knows more now, he knows what to call things and before when he didn’t, he saw and noticed but didn’t know what things were. He knows about drugs, and that adults do dumb things that even they know don’t make sense. That’s one thing he didn’t see before. Theo wonders if he’ll do weird things that don’t make sense, too, when he’s a grownup. He wonders if he’ll hurt things or people. He tells himself no, but thinks of times he’s maybe done it already. He’s Lawrence now, at the edge of the desert, and he’s climbing to a dune’s top, pulling at the sea oats and trying not to pull them out but he does and feels bad, he doesn’t like killing things, even plants. It seems unfair, that some random creature can come along and pull a thing up or kill it, he doesn’t like that now that he is old enough to think about it. He likes meat, however. So he stops thinking about it.

Theo on the dune, wind pushing his hair from his eyes. Theo’s arm is shiny, jeweled armor – he lifts and looks and can see flecks of light, the salt that he knows from class is a crystal, which means it has a shape – he thinks he can see it, maybe, but can’t remember what it’s called. He’s a lizard with a crystal skin, he lies on the sand, on his stomach, rubbing against the sand, wriggling. It feels good and he closes his eyes, watching enemies lazy and vulnerable and not knowing they are being watched. The ladies sit and the men flit around them, bring them things, touch them, push them over, and the ladies just laugh. Sometimes one will get up and walk toward the water. A couple of the ladies are standing up with men. The men lie on the sand alone, or squat; a couple are throwing something, a bottle, back and forth like a football but they keep dropping
it or missing it, throwing badly. Mingus’s fountain is just a weird pile of sand, everyone gone from it. They probably didn’t want to waste the alcohol, Theo thinks. Theo can’t see his dad – where is he.

Theo lifts his head, scans: Adrian’s lying on his stomach and a lady is smearing something on his back. Adrian’s still wearing his underwear. Theo wonders if Adrian remembers. Adrian flips over and the lady’s rubbing his stomach. No, Theo decides. Theo rolls over and down the dune, rolling over sea oats stiff and dry, cracking. They keep the dunes from blowing away, Theo knows. His dune’s not that big and he has to push himself to keep rolling. At the bottom he stops on his back, squinting up at gulls fighting over something that looks like a sandwich, chasing the one with the white square in its beak. Maybe it was his sandwich. Theo can’t remember if he finished it.

All is dry on the beach, and then there is all that water, a country of water. The people that live there are fish. Sharks are out there, and dolphins and whales. What else. Submarines and octopuses. Treasure somewhere. Theo is tired of being alone. Shipwrecked.

Theo slips through the sand behind the dunes now, the sound muffled. Now there are birds and wind in the stiff branches of the trees at the back lawn’s edge, the trees old creatures ready to fight if they have to. Theo’s army –
wait, I’ll go and check, this house looks deserted
.

There’s no one outside that Theo can see. He moves quietly, wanting to get inside the castle without the guards knowing. He moves along from chair to chair, toward the gazebo, which he runs up into keeping an eye out for the Seal, and is through and down the other side. Better to go in back or front. Back
maybe; but they’ll be expecting that, it could be a trap, the glass doors are open and it’s dark inside. He’ll go to the front side; he slips carefully around the house’s right side, and flattens himself against the wall, inside the row of bristly green bushes, and moves to the gray corner and takes a quick look around: the front doors are open, folded inward; maybe another trap, the mouth. His mother’s car left with her. He has to be careful. Theo slips away from the bushes, where there are always sharp things and spiderwebs, which Theo hates. He likes spiders but hates the webs.

The best strategy is to run fast up and roll, so he streaks up and in, the stones cold on his feet slapping, and he hits the black and white tiles and rolls to the side and knocks into the pieces of Colin’s big chessmen and makes a lot of noise, hitting a metal trashcan that had been a bishop’s head.

Theo hears hooves clopping.

A man on a horse emerges down the hall, the horse brown and the man with long hair and a suit with a big flower on the flap of the jacket. He is holding a black bottle, and has yellow gloves on. Theo notices the man’s feet in the stirrups are in sneakers. The man’s head is near the black ceiling.

Is this Adrian’s house.

Yes. Who are you.

I’m a friend of his. You look like him – are you his son.

Yes.

Nice to meet you. My name’s Barry. I’m in the house up the road a couple of clicks. I heard he was camped here too. Where is he.

He’s on the beach.

Which way is that.

It’s around the back of the house, where the ocean is.

Ha. Right about that. What’s the best way to get there.

Follow the hall to the kitchen and then go through the ballroom to the back lawn.

Right then. Thanks, be seeing you. Hey, you want to ride out with me.

The man smiles and looks kind of familiar. Theo figures, famous too. He doesn’t know where he would sit. Theo notices his big watch.

What time is it.

The man lifts his wrist: two-thirteen p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

Um. I have to find my grandfather.

Fair enough. Ah domanee, then.

What.

A domani. It’s Italian, it means may the force be with you.

Okay.

Theo had gone to this big deal New York premiere of Star Wars with his mother and some of her friends. They left before it was over to go to a party in a tall building next to Central Park, and then another party in a warehouse somewhere. Theo slept in the car with a minder, and woke up in a different hotel than the one they were living in. His dad was maybe on tour.