Virgin Territory (20 page)

“There you are! I thought you’d left for good.”

“I would never leave. Not without saying good-bye.”

“You can’t ever leave. Not ever. And not now. Not after last night.”

“You’re right. We’re in this together.”

“Forever.”

But of course, when I arrive, Angela isn’t there. Usually, this early in the morning, the only people around are a few straggling members of the ground’s crew; but even they are packed up and gone. I’m alone out here, and each step placed on the just-mown grass feels fresh and new. The sunlight casts long, dramatic sweeps of shadow and light. If I look closely at the bright spots, I can see steam rising up where the dew is burning off. In other places the grass glistens as though someone just emptied bags of Christmas glitter and a big spotlight is shining on the whole mess.

I don’t know who is more startled, the birds roosting in the branches of the nearby trees or me. A whole dumb flock flies up in a panic and dots the sky with black. Crazy birds. They’ve got nothing to fear from me. I’m not interested in them, not today. I’ve come to find Angela.

As I step into the grove, the scent of pine is so strong I can taste it. I take a deep breath and let the piney coolness sting the insides of my nostrils. I keep moving across the soft ground toward the shady center of the trees.

I notice a scattering of wood chips. Hundreds, maybe thousands of little bits are lying here and there. Their blond color is in sharp contrast to the usual red-brown of the groundcover that’s been specially imported from China. These chips are different; they’re freshly made. As I approach, I can see tiny globs of sticky sap still clinging to some of the chips, and the smell of pine is so strong I’m reminded more of cat piss and less of Christmas morning.

The tree is gone, but at the same time it’s there. Like the root of a pulled tooth, like an amputated leg, like Angela—it’s there and not there. Stupidly, I count the rings of the stump. Is it possible that the tree was older than me? And then because I can’t believe my own eyes, I kneel down on the soft ground and touch the sticky, uneven surface of the stump with my hand. The whole scene makes me stop and wonder about the thing that should be there but isn’t.

I walk back to the clubhouse. I want to find Prendergast and ask him if Jack Felder ordered the tree to be destroyed. You can’t just go around knocking something down on a beautiful, blue-sky morning because the thing doesn’t suit your worldview, because you don’t believe in it.

When I find him, he’s in the dining room, calmly arranging juice glasses before the breakfast rush, and he looks as though trees are the furthest things from his mind. I’m out of breath, but I’m able to stand there like a crazy person until he feels the intensity of my angry stare. Finally, he’s forced to look up.

“Oh,” he says.

“Yeah,” I reply.

I’m just about to launch into a speech about the tree and Jack Felder and what’s wrong with the world, when Prendergast points across the room and says, “Someone’s here to see you.”

The guy is sitting at one of the long tables. A shaft of sunlight is spotlighting him dramatically. He must’ve seen me enter. I mean, Prendergast and me are the only people in the room. And him. He looks vaguely foreign, Mexican maybe. He has straight silver hair, lots of wrinkles, dark eyes, and the sun-tinted skin tone of a day laborer. I walk across the room and stand in front of the table. He wears a crisp, green plaid, short-sleeved shirt, pressed jeans, and his leather sandals look as though he’s walked a long way in them. He’s old, but in good shape—the result, I imagine, of his having lived close to the land and mostly outdoors. He puts down his Styrofoam coffee cup, waves, and then gestures for me to join him.

“And you are?” I ask, sounding a little more aggressive than I’d intended.

His eyebrows shoot up, and then he points to the seat opposite him.

“Sit. Sit. You look out of breath. Were you running?”

“No, I was not running. Who are you?”

“Oh,” he says, quickly touching his forehead to signal that he’s forgotten something. “I am a good friend to your grandmother. My name is Frankie Rey.”

Somehow I thought he’d be more of a dashing figure, taller, maybe wearing some kind of traditional Central American garb, like a poncho or a cape, and certainly not as old as this guy. He looks like one of the oldies at
the place
, the kind of person who waits forever for a bus or stands in the eight-items-or-less line at the grocery store.

“You might want to sit down,” he suggests. “You look a little shaky.”

“We thought you were—”

“I know,” he says. “And I’m sorry for that. But Marie always insisted. She didn’t want your father to know about us. She thought he would not be so happy about it. I respected her wish.”

“Were you the one who was driving her places?” I ask.

“I did give her a ride from time to time,” he says, offering me a gentle smile as he shrugs one shoulder. “But you know Marie. When she wants to get out, she gets out. She is a very determined lady.”

He blows a few cool breaths over the rim of his coffee cup. I’m still reeling from the revelation that this guy is flesh and blood and not just some character that Marie made up. But as I sit down in the chair opposite him, my mind is clear enough to wonder how he knew where to find me. I ask him point-blank.

“Marie was always asking about you,” he explains. “She knows you are at home some nights alone, and she worried. I called the house the first time to see if you were there, to hear your voice, to know you were okay. But then, the next time I called, you started talking. I listened. So I know things about you, where you go, your friends. I’m sorry. Was that wrong?”

I turn away from him and stare out the window. Just on the other side of the glass, not far from where we’re sitting, two old guys wearing golf hats are getting ready to tee off. A new kid I’ve never seen before is their caddy, but even from a distance I can tell that he hasn’t been trained. He fumbles with the leather golf bags and the clubs, and he keeps searching the pockets of his cargo pants for items that he should have at hand. The kid is like a comedy act. When he accidentally drops a fresh box of balls near the first tee, he’s forced to go galloping down the hill to collect them.

“You should’ve identified yourself,” I tell him.

“But Marie,” he says. “Marie didn’t want your father to know.”

“I’m not my father,” I say, looking at him straight in the eye and holding his gaze until he has to look away.

“Anyway,” Frankie Rey continues, “I was afraid you would run away, so I came down here last night. I waited outside the place where you slept until dawn. Your father will be here soon.”

“Did you call him?”

“He’ll be here.”

I can see the kid making his way back up the embankment. He’s retrieved the balls, but the old guys aren’t impressed. The damage has been done. They shake their heads disapprovingly. I know what they’re thinking.
This kid’s hopeless
. But the kid will get it right—eventually. I know, because I was once that kid—hopeless.

“Maybe you saw my friend, Angela. Did you? A girl with long black hair. Very pretty. She was here, but I think she’s taken off for …”

And before I can finish, he’s shaking his head no and looking down at his hands, which are tanned and rough and splayed out on the table. He then takes another sip of coffee and says, “And the statue is missing. Marie’s little gold statue. It’s gone. I thought you might know something about it.”

I have to work hard to keep my face from betraying me.

“I didn’t take it,” I say, sounding more guilty than I thought possible. “I mean, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not a thief.”

He lifts his chin as though he’s trying to see me from a different angle without getting up from his seat. “I didn’t say you
took it,” he replied. And then he adds, “But do you know where it is?”

“And you’re a grave robber,” I say accusingly. “You can’t sit here and accuse me of being a thief if you’re a grave robber yourself.”

“It’s true. I robbed graves,” he says. “But you must know those people were dead. For hundreds of years. And it was a long time ago I did that.”

We sit together in silence for a few minutes. I decide not to say another word. Why should I tell him anything? He already knows too much from listening to me on the phone all those nights. He knows all he needs to know about me—except the one thing that he actually wants to know.

“So they cut down the tree,” I say, trying to change the subject. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s gone. They chopped it down.”

“The tree that—”

“Yeah,” I interrupt him. “That tree. It’s gone.”

“You know,” says Frankie Rey, pointing to the landscape beyond the glass. “Years ago, this land was swamp. That whole area over there was once virgin territory: wild, untamed. Now it’s clipped and clean. They’ve made it look like something out of a magazine. It’s the same everywhere. In my country there’s a mountain range called the Sierra Nevada. And not long ago illegal loggers and drug enforcement officials destroyed thousands of acres there. They had their reasons, but I can’t help feeling
the loss of all that wildness, all that mystery. Life is not so neat. It will not be tamed. It gets messy. We push it back and make it look like something out of a magazine, but only for a little while. Then the wildness comes back, always, and then there’s the mess, the mystery again.”

I don’t know why, but I reach my hand down into the shopping bag, which is sitting alongside my chair, and slowly, I pull out the little gold god. I place it on the table between us.

“It’s not really gold, is it?” I ask him. “I mean, it’s not worth anything.”

“No,” he says. “But he is worth more than gold.”

He picks up the little god, turns him this way and that, and examines him for damage. Satisfied, he slips the thing into his shirt pocket so only the jagged crown is poking out.

Just then Doug comes striding into the room; he has a wild look in his eye, his hair looks like a toupee, and his shirt is drenched with sweat as though he’s run all the way from home. The minute he sees me at the table, all the air collapses from his lungs in a giant sigh of relief. I stand up, and he rushes toward me, grabs hold of me, and starts to cry.

“Thank God you’re safe,” he says between sobs. “I thought you left town. But Mary Jo said, ‘No, no, he’d never just take off.’ She said you were a good kid. She said, ‘He’s not going anywhere. He loves you. He’ll be back.’ ”

I try to pull away from him, but he holds me tighter and won’t let me go. To comfort him, I gently touch his hair, and
my fingers remember. You wouldn’t think the thick black hair of a grown man could be so soft, but it is, always has been; it’s just that I’ve forgotten because I haven’t touched his hair in so long. When I was a kid, I used to get my hands into it and mess it up. He’d pretend to get mad, act as if he were a fancy lady and I was some crazy person intent on undoing a hairdo. This always made Kat laugh and laugh so hard that she would finally double over and plead with us to stop.

“Remember the thing with your hair?” I ask him. And I can tell that he does because I can see the memory arrange itself in his eyes and a slow smile crinkling his crow’s-feet.

When I look back at the table, Frankie Rey is gone. He must have slipped out of the room when I was turned away.

“Did you see him?” I ask Doug. “Did you see Frankie Rey?”

“Huh?” he asks, and I get this sinking feeling.

“He was sitting at the table with me when you came in the room. Didn’t you see him?”

“Who’re you talking about?”

“Frankie Rey. I’m talking about Frankie Rey. I thought that’s how you knew where to find me. I thought he called you.”

“You mean,
our
Frankie Rey?” he asks, raising his voice a little. And when I nod, he adds, “Nobody called me. I had a hunch, that’s all. Had a feeling you’d be here. And how could Frankie Rey call me anyway? He’s not real.”

I run over to the table and touch the chair where he was just sitting. I touch it all over, as if there’s a magic spot on it that will
make him suddenly materialize. Then I madly dig to the bottom my shopping bag in search of the little gold god. I come up empty-handed and give Doug a wild look.

“Are you all right?” he asks, placing his rough hand on my shoulder and looking into my face as if I have a fever.

But I don’t answer him. I’m too busy trying to remember what Frankie Rey said to me only a few minutes before:
“Life is not so neat. It will not be tamed. It gets messy. We push it back and make it look like something out of a magazine, but only for a little while. Then the wildness comes back, always, and then there’s the mess, the mystery again.”

On the way home, Doug and I don’t say much. We just sit there in the front seat with the bag of photos between us. I know I’m not going to tell him about last night with Angela; that’s off limits. And I can’t say anything else about Frankie Rey, either, not without seeming like a crazy person. Maybe I’ve entered a new period of my life when things will happen, things that Doug will never know about.