Trapped

“I’m sorry, sir.” The guard is blocking his way, but not yet willing to lay hands on him.

“I own the casino,” Ricky reminds him. “You get that?”

“I don’t know who actually owns the casino, sir. I only know that you are not permitted to enter the premises.”

“That was my rule,” Ricky says, pretending to be reasonable. “I made the rule, I can break it.”

The guard grimaces, eyes swiveling for the reinforcements that haven’t yet arrived. Nobody likes dealing with Ricky Lang, they’re slow-footing it.

“Tribal council makes the rules, sir,” the guard responds rather plaintively. “Members of the tribe are not permitted in the casino.”

Ricky doing a two-step dance with the man, trying to get an angle on the entrance. “I am the tribe,” Ricky says. “I’m the sachem, the chief, the boss. This casino exists because of me.”

The guard reaches out, places a tentative hand on the center of Ricky’s chest.

“Sir, please.”

Ricky looks down at the hand, amazed, and becomes very still.

“I know who you are, Mr. Lang,” says the guard, as if desperate for him to understand. “Tribal council says you can’t come in, you can’t come in.”

Ricky selects one of the guard’s fingers, breaks it with a twitch of his fist. Before the man can fully react to the convulsion of pain, Ricky rolls him across the pavement, where he flops, moaning, at the feet of the seniors entering the casino.

“Help!” a Q-tip screams, an elderly woman, or maybe it’s an old man, hard to tell when they get that age. “Indians!”

Ricky laughs all the way back to his BMW. Indians, what a riot. The old lady probably thought she was about to be scalped. As sachem of the Nakosha, an elected office that made him both chief and high priest, he could have explained that traditional warriors did not take scalps. Never had. Scalps were taken by white soldiers, as souvenirs and to collect bounties. Nakosha warriors took noses—the nose was the seat of dignity—and threaded them into battle necklaces. Some warriors used knives to harvest the noses, others used their teeth. If it ever comes to that, Ricky decides he’ll go with the knife.

4. The Sacred Rights Of Momhood

Okay, putting your ear to your daughter’s door doesn’t look good, I’ll admit it. But Kelly is in her room for about ten minutes—door locked, of course—when her latest ringtone starts blasting away. Something from Snow Patrol, who are actually sort of cute. Anyway, I hear the cell go off, my mom-antenna reminds me of the Seth problem. As in who-is-Seth-and-how-did-he-get-in-Kelly’s-life without-me-ever-hearing-his-name, let alone any sort of description or explanation?

Very clever way my daughter has of not answering a simple question: she volunteers for punishment and then disappears into her room, locking the door.

The mysterious Seth, the young man with the motorcycle, that’s probably him on the phone right now. And since Kelly has refused to give me any details, it’s within my rights, the sacred rights of motherhood, to determine who this kid is—all that stuff about how the boy really wanted her to wear a helmet sounds bogus to me. Besides, he was the one driving like a lunatic, right?

Try as I might, I can’t hear a thing. They must be whispering to each other. What I want to know—is he in her class, is he older, what? All I caught was a glimpse, but come to think of it, the minimum age to legally carry a passenger in New York is seventeen. So he’s at least a year ahead of Kelly, maybe more.

Finally I work up the courage and knock.

“Kel?” I ask through the closed door. “We have to talk. Who is this boy? Does he go to your school? Do I know his parents?”

After a slight delay she calls out, “It’s late, Mom.”

I picture her hand cupped over the phone, her eyes rolling.

“It’s nine o’clock,” I remind her. “Since when is that late?”

“I’m really tired, Mom. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? I’ll tell you all about it, honest.”

She’s so polite that it isn’t in me to argue. And once again she’s right—by morning I’ll be thinking much more clearly. Not only less freaked about the whole scene, but also less likely to be manipulated into, say, letting her self-select her punishment.

Maybe grounded isn’t the right call. Maybe what Kelly needs is a few months volunteering at an E.R. Let her see what happens to kids who risk their lives on a dare, or for the fun of it. Get her pushing wheelchairs, changing drool cups, all that good stuff. I picture a light going off over her head, an epiphany, how fragile life is. Kelly giving me a big hug, saying, Mom, you were right! I have to be careful!

The fantasies of parenthood. As Kelly herself would say, there’s minus no chance of that. Minus no chance—in teen-talk, that’s less than zero, with a sneer.

Most of the women I know watch Letterman or Leno or Conan before they drop off. Tuning in to the mainstream can be reassuring, I guess. It helps us relax, reminds us that we all have our troubles, we’re all capable of Stupid Human Tricks.

I’m not averse to a little tube before bed, but the only way I can get my head ready for sleep is to make a list. Putting the next day in order helps me feel less anxious about what’s expected of me.

1. check fabrics, ECWW

2. place Tanner order

3. check on second fittings, Norbert & Spinelli weddings

4. call Tracy

5. call Fred

6. lunch McQ

7. dry cleaners

8. grocery

ECWW is East Coast Wedding Wholesalers, where I purchase ninety percent of the fabrics for my clients. The satin, silk and lace people. The company is normally very reliable, but they’ve got a new guy running the shipping department and he’s been messing up my orders. I have to do something about that. Last year my little one-woman company purchased over two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fabrics from East Coast—far from their biggest account but not insignificant. Number two, Haley Tanner, I’ve mentioned already. Norbert and Spinelli are upcoming weddings, nine bridesmaids and two bridal gowns between them, both slightly behind schedule because everything is slightly behind—see the problems at East Coast. Number four on the list, Tracy Gilardi, came on to assist with fittings three years ago, but she turned out to be so competent I tend to let her do her own thing—where I get excitable she always remains calm, which can be very helpful in nervous-making situations like weddings. Fred is Fred Grossman, my accountant. I want to check on quarterly tax payments. Alex McQuarrie is one of the top wedding planners in the area; he throws me a bone now and then, sets me up with a high-budget client. Or not. Sometimes all he wants is a companion for lunch, a sympathetic ear. We’ll see. Dry cleaners and grocery, self-explanatory.

Business and personal, all in order, every item checked off. Lights out, time for bed.

Worrying always exhausts me. So I’m out cold moments after my head sinks into the pillow. The only dream that sticks is something about being at the beach. It’s night and I’m a kid, my daughter’s age, looking for something along the shore. Is it my keys? How will I get home if I can’t find my keys? I search and search, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand. And then my alarm sounds and it’s a new day.

Seven o’clock, lots of things to do, not least of which is a very frank discussion with Kelly over breakfast. Or maybe I’ll wait until we’re in the car. She’s got a job at Macy’s for the summer—the cosmetics counter—and that will give us twenty minutes or so to discuss the new boyfriend, see if I can figure out how serious it is.

Kitchen or car, one way or the other we’ll sort it out.

In my bathrobe, hair still damp, I knock on Kelly’s door. Part of my job, playing rooster.

The unlocked door swings open.

“Kel? Rise and shine.”

At first I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing. Her bed is already made, throw pillows in place. Not possible, not at this hour.

“Kelly?”

That’s when I see the note. A note prominently displayed on her desk, held down by her South Park pencil holder. A note written in her usual florid felt tip, abbreviated as if it were e-mail.

Don’t worry, Mom, it’s not what u think. Something came up. Will call u 2morrow at high noon. Luv u tigers and tons(really!),

K.

She’s gone. Run away.

5. Somebody Special

The way Roy Whittle figures, there’s white man crazy and there’s Indian crazy. Both are bad, but Indian crazy is worse ‘cause in his opinion Indians are all crazy to begin with. Your average swamp injun is a few shy of a load for starters. Add liquor and syphilis and crazy ain’t far behind.

“You figure Ricky’s lost it?” Roy asks his brother.

Dug is driving, bumping their brand-new Dodge Ram over the rutted road that leads to the old airfield. He shoots a puzzled look at his brother. “Huh?” Dug not being one to jump into conversation without prodding.

“Acting weird,” Roy says. “The big chief. Ricky Lang.”

Dug shrugs. “Can’t say.”

They’re fraternal twins, but it’s always seemed to Roy that he got all the words, the conversational ability and most of the brains. You can’t say Dug is simple, exactly, not if you don’t want him pounding you, but he’s not a man given to speaking much, or expressing opinions. Or other normal stuff like reading a little and planning ahead—Roy does that for the both of them.

“Ricky pays us,” Dug points out, nodding to himself in satisfaction, having solved the question.

“Yep, he does.” Roy sighs. Might as well be talking to himself. But he can’t let go of the idea that Ricky has been acting peculiar. For instance his recent Superman talk. Staring at Roy with his hard little eyes and saying he can see into his head, he’s got X-ray vision. Like he can read Roy’s mind. A scary thought indeed.

When the big man first approached them, Roy thought it was strange, a Nakosha sachem wanting to hire a couple of local white boys. But when he’d explained the situation with his tribe, and what he intended to do about it, it sort of made sense that he needed outside help. Any reservations Roy had got erased by the offer of a new truck with a legal title, insurance paid for, the whole bit. Plus cash money in the very near future. But the last few days he had occasion to wonder if maybe Ricky wasn’t, when you got right down to it, bat-shit crazy. At the very least he was totally unpredictable, and that made him dangerous.

Roy vows to be extra damn careful with Ricky Lang, truck or no truck, money or no money.

They come around the last snaky turn in the old logging road. Ahead is the airfield, wide and clear. Not paved, because paving would draw too much attention, but scraped and leveled and hard-rolled, and suitable for everything but the very largest aircraft. Five thousand feet from end to end, straight as a string. A much improved version of the old, rutted clearing where, once upon a time, smugglers limped in, flying wheezy old DC-3 Dakotas loaded with bales of whatever, no runway lights to guide them other than a few pools of smoky kerosene set afire. Wild times that more or less ended before Roy and Dug were old enough to participate.

Unlike their poor pappy, who died in Raiford Correctional, basting in his own bitter juices.

Don’t trust nobody, boys, least of all yur so-called frens.

That was Pappy’s only song, for years before he died. How he was ratted by friends and associates and blood relatives. A long story, partly true, mostly bull. The sad fact was, the old man was the last in a long line of willing rats, with nobody left to rat out. Boys who started out jacking gators ended up rich, wrecking fifty-thousand-dollar Jaguars on backcountry roads for the sheer stupid fun of it, until they were spent out, broke, back in the cracker swamplands where they started.

Roy, twenty-four years old and barely out of the same neck of the Everglades, has no intention of going back, not without a wad of cash in his pocket. Enough for him and Dug to live decent. And near as he can figure, Ricky Lang is the man to back, moneywise. That is, if he don’t go totally squirrel.

“What we do?” Dug wants to know, gazing at the empty airfield.

“Ricky wants us to wait,” Roy explains, patient as always. He’d started out life five minutes ahead, is still waiting for his brother to catch up.

“Huh? Wait for what?”

“Somebody’s coming,” Roy says. He opens the glove compartment, takes out his brand-new ten mil Auto Glock 20 with the fifteen-round magazine. “Somebody special.”

6. Worse Than Sex

Fern has been my best friend since the first day of first grade. She sealed the deal by finding my shoes. Brand-new shoes strapped onto my pudgy little feet by my mother barely an hour before a group of marauding third-graders—big as invading Huns to me—knocked me down on the playground, pulled up my dress and threw my brand-new shoes into the woods behind the school.

There must have been adults overseeing us, but I have no recollection of that. All I remember is being devastated. Destroyed. These were the shoes I’d insisted on when shopping for my new school outfits. Expensive, from the way my mom pursed her lips and looked worried, but I’d made a fuss and she’d given in. Now the precious shoes were gone. I couldn’t go into the school barefoot—mortal shame—and I couldn’t go home. I was lost. The new world of first grade had ended before it even began.

I cried so hard I couldn’t see. And then this big girl came out of the fog of tears, a lovely girl three years older than me, with bright, beautiful, almond-shaped green eyes and wonderfully curly hair. She put her arm around my shoulders and helped me smooth down my dress and promised to find my shoes. She did find them, and helped me strap them on, and twenty-five years later whenever I get irritated with Fern, or find her wearisome, I think of the shoes, and that seals the deal all over again.

So it’s Fern who gets the first distress call.

“Kelly ran away,” I say, my voice breaking. “With a boy.”

“Oh, Jane! No way! I have to sit down.”

Fern has the wireless, carries it to her favorite chair, the soft leather recliner that belonged to her ex-husband. Poor Edgar. A sweet guy but no match for Fern, not in marriage, not in divorce, not in life. I know she’s using Edgar’s old chair because I recognize the sound of the squeaking springs as she settles in, pushes back, lifting her size-ten feet. “There,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

I try, but naturally, Fern being Fern, she interrupts long before everything gets told. “So you’re telling me Kelly stayed out all night and skipped out on her summer job? Welcome to the club, Jane.”

“But she’s never—”

“That you know of. Please. She’s sixteen. Everything but their name is a lie. Sometimes the name, too. I got these calls for Cheyenne? Frat boys looking for Cheyenne. Is that like a stripper name? Jessica was calling herself Cheyenne at some club, gave out her home number. Unbelievable. Jess has a tested IQ of one thirty-five, but at clubs it apparently drops to about sixty-five.”

“So you’re telling me not to worry.”

“No, no, no. Be very worried. Just don’t think you’re alone.”

“But what if she’s having sex?” I ask plaintively.

That gets a laugh out of Fern. Laughter so hearty it seems to warm the receiver on my phone. “If, Jane? Did you say if? Of course she’s having sex! Why else would she stay out all night with Smike?”

“Seth. His name is Seth.”

“He told Kelly his name is Seth and she told you. He could be Smike for all you know. Or Squeers. Or Snagsby. Probably something with an S. Like Sex.”

Fern is riffing now, trying to make me laugh. I know what she’s doing, but I can’t help responding, and my heart unclenches. A big, tension-relieving sigh and anxiety begins to recede like the tide.

It’s so much easier on the phone. If Fern was here I’d be worried she’d see the tears in my eyes and go all soft, and then we’d both be blubbering.

“I hate it that they grow up,” I tell her, taking a deep breath.

“No you don’t,” she responds. “Not so many years ago you were praying she’d get the chance to grow up. Your prayers were answered.”

“True.”

“The miracle kid. She’s a character. They broke the mold. What a personality she has! If the average person has a hundred watts, Kelly has five hundred, all of it beaming. One day she’ll make you proud, but right now all she wants to do is blow your mind. And maybe Smike’s little thingy.”

“Fern! Please!”

“His little mind, too.”

Nobody enjoys her jokes better than Fern herself and that gets her laughing until she can barely breathe. After a while, after we’ve both enjoyed a few moments of silent communion, she goes, “So, you got a battle plan?”

“Grounding doesn’t seem to mean much.”

“Means nothing. Not unless you can lock ‘em up and throw away the key. What you gotta do, you gotta scare some sense into her.”

“And how do I do that?”

“With Jess I used to grab my chest, make my face go all white. Make her think my heart was about to stop.”

“You can do that, make your face go white?”

“Years of practice scaring my own mother.”

“I can’t fake a heart attack, Fern.”

“A seizure then. That’s easier. All you gotta do is drool.”

I’m crying now, but tears of laughter.

“It’ll be okay,” Fern says, shifting to serious. “You’ll see. Kelly’s a good soul. She’ll know what to do, even if you don’t.”

“You really think so?”

“I really do. But just in case, can you fake a nosebleed?”

I’m still smiling ten minutes later when I enter Kelly’s room. My intention is to rummage around, see if she left a contact number for Seth. No doubt it’s right there on her computer somewhere, but her computer is forbidden to me. The personal computer, Kelly has explained, is like a diary. Therefore no peeking, on pain of death. To which I agreed. Not the death part, of course, but the general idea. So in my mind her computer is off-limits until one second past noon. Until then I’ll stick to her address book, the handy little purse-size one I gave, assuming she hasn’t taken it with her.

Can’t find the address book. What I do find, nestled way back in the drawer, very nearly gives me that seizure Fern was suggesting. A photo album I’ve never seen before. Quite new, very slick.

Pictures of my daughter doing something really awful. Something worse than sex. Far, far worse.

7. When Sleepy Voices Make It Snow

Once when Roy Whittle was a boy—just the one time—Pap took the whole family to a carnival in Belle Glade. Some kind of harvest jubilee thing, where they blessed the dirt and prayed for the sugarcane, or anyhow that’s how Pappy explained it, in the brief interval when he was sober and smiling.

The thing about it was, the memory Roy savors, he and Dug got to pretty much run wild because Pappy was off doing whatever he did, and their momma went to the bingo, and the Whittle boys were left to their own devices. They didn’t have money for rides or cotton candy, so they took to sneaking into the sideshow tents. Crawling under the heavy canvas, flat on their bellies, the smell of wet grass in their faces. Saw Howard Huge, the blubbery fat man, big as a whale and sitting on a scale that proved he weighed a thousand pounds. Saw a boy using a hammer to drive big spikes up his nose, which Dug thought was funny—it was a rare thing, hearing his brother laugh out loud—and a skinny old woman with really disgusting scaly skin calling herself the Real Fiji Mermaid.

What Roy remembers best though, is getting hypnotized. This man in a shiny black suit and western string tie, the Amazing Mizmar, had the ability to control minds not his own. Picking folks out of the little audience for his famous experiment in mass hypnosis, he’d pointed out Dug to his pretty assistant, but Dug wouldn’t have none of it. He wasn’t one for talking to strangers, or drawing attention. So Roy took his place up on the stage with the other victims, all of them looking pretty sheepish, and then the Amazing Mizmar produced this truly amazing device, a glittery little ball on the end of a wand. He clicked the wand and the glittery ball shot pulses of light. Alluring, rhythmic pulses that blended in with the Amazing Mizmar’s sleepy voice, urging Roy to stare at the wand and feel the light and then to close his eyes and still see the light through his eyelids, and in less than a minute Roy was really and truly hypnotized. It was like being awake but sleeping somehow, frozen in a half-dream, in-between state, and it felt good. Felt right somehow. When the voice suggested it was snowing, Roy looked around, delighted—he’d never seen snow—and then set about dusting the big wet flakes from his shoulders. The laughter of the crowd was like the sound of flowing water or the crying of distant gulls, and when the voice told him to wake up at the sound—a sharp hand clap—he tried resisting. Wanted to stay in the between world, where sleepy voices made it snow.

Roy still has his “between” moments and this is one of them. Sitting in the air-conditioned cab of their new Dodge Ram, Dug nods off as they wait, and Roy studies the shimmering waves of heat that rise from the white runway. Makes the air look like pulsing, transparent jelly. With that and the regular sound of Dug breathing heavy through his nose, Roy can almost hear the drone of the Amazing Mizmar’s voice, he can almost see through the heat-shimmered air into some other place.

Almost but not quite, because Ricky Lang pulls him back into the big bad world. Yanks open the door and pokes Roy with an index finger that feels like a warm steel rod in the ribs.

“Wake up,” says Ricky.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” says Roy. “I’m keeping watch.”

Ricky, studying him from behind his mirrored sunglasses. Nodding to himself. “Uh-huh. Whatever. What you watching for, Roy?”

“Like you said. A plane.”

Ricky’s face untightens, and he smiles with just his lips. “Good. The specific aircraft we’re expecting, that would be a Beechcraft King Air 350. Twin turboprops. Color, green and silver. Tail number ends in seven, my lucky number.”

“Yes, sir,” says Roy. He’s tried nudging Dug, but Dug is deeply asleep, and he’s worried about how it looks, his brother snoozing while the boss is giving instructions.

“Leave him be,” Ricky suggests. “Don’t matter if he sleeps through the end of the world. This is on you, not your retarded brother.”

“Dug ain’t retarded.”

“Whatever’s wrong with him, that’s not my concern. You got the Glock?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know how to fire it? How to get the safety off, rack a bullet into the chamber, all that?”

Roy nods. He’s pretty sure he knows all that.

“Good,” says Ricky. “Then you know how to leave the safety on, how not to fire it.”

“What’re you saying?” Roy asks.

“I’m saying the gun is for show. Don’t shoot nobody is what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” says Roy. “I won’t.”

“Good. Little while, the aircraft will circle the field. It will land from the east, over there,” Ricky says, indicating where the long runway blends into the low scrub pine. “It will taxi to us. First thing you do, when the engines shut down, you come around from behind and put the chocks under the wheels. Think you can do that?”

“I guess.”

“Make sure you come at it from the back of the plane, behind the wing, so you don’t get your fool head cut off by the props.”

“Okay.” Roy files it away, the propellers are dangerous, watch out for the props.

“You just follow my lead,” Ricky says. “Wheels chocked, okay? Next, we get the passengers out of the aircraft. There’s a little door unfolds in the tail, that’s where they’ll exit. Don’t show the gun till their feet’re on the ground.”

“How many passengers?” Roy asks, just to show that he’s always thinking.

“One or two,” Ricky says, indifferent to the question. “Whatever, you just hold the Glock on ‘em. Don’t say nothing, just look like you mean it. Don’t let ‘em go back in the plane but don’t shoot ‘em. I’m doing all the shooting.”