“I was just fuckin’ around,” said Malcolm, smiling nervously as he edged back toward his half-dug hole. “My grandma says I don’t know when to shut up, and I guess she’s right, but you’re okay, aren’t you, killer?”
“Fuck you,” said John, but he smiled a little as he said it. It was hard to stay angry with someone so beautiful. Behind the skinny boy Vick stood looking embarrassed, cheeks flushed and shoulders hunched. The tall, good-looking kid, Gabe, watched John with what looked like respect.
“Yeah,” said Malcolm, his smile widening. He punched John’s shoulder lightly. “If you can find your dick under all that—kidding! Kidding!” he squealed as he danced back a few steps from John’s raised fist. “Fuck me. I get it. Fuck me.”
They went back to their holes, John tired and aching, thighs rubbed raw from walking in the heat, but with a feeling of relief in his chest, a feeling that something quick and cruel had made its play for him and missed the killing bite.
“Thanks,” he said softly to Andrew. She smiled back at him, sad and pretty with her big, dark eyes, and then picked up her shovel and turned to her hole.
After breakfast, Enoch and Cheryl herded Nadine’s group and a few upperclassmen, one of them the Cleaver bitch, into the back of the pickup, Cheryl heaving the tailgate up and shoving until it locked into place with a metallic clunk. From her seat on top of the wheel well Nadine watched Names-and-Dates pass with another group of girls out by the cabins and smirked at the sight of her swollen nose and bandaged arm. I hope that bite gets infected, she thought, relishing the mental image of skin swelling red and tight, of pus leaking from fissured skin. I hope your fucking arm rots off, you cunt.
The counselors got into the cab and the truck roared to life and jolted into motion, throwing girls against one another. Felix had a blank, fixed look on his face. Betty, perched on the opposite well, and the unibrow who seemed to spend her waking hours glued to the red-haired girl’s side like one of those flat-headed fish that sealed themselves onto sharks’ bellies, stared at the incoming campers with open contempt.
Nadine brought two fingers to her mouth, spread them into a vee, and licked the gap between them until Unibrow turned red and looked away. The new girls on her side of the truck bed giggled. They were past the last of the cabins now, a staff member in denim and sunglasses dragging a chain-link gate open for them as they headed out on a rough dirt road. In the distance a rock ridge rose up from the bare, dead earth.
“You don’t wanna fuck with Athena,” said Betty.
“Why not?”
A sharklike grin. “Because that would mean you were fucking with me,” she said. “And I’d drag you out of bed some night and drown you in a toilet.”
“All right,” said Nadine, wondering if Betty had ever actually killed anyone. She’d known a girl at school when they lived in Texas who people said had killed her brother and done time in juvie. It happened. She probably just talks tough, thought Nadine, though she didn’t quite believe it. She’s just some ugly dyke who wants to be teacher’s pet. “Try it. See what happens.”
The truck cut north toward the mountains, hitting a pothole that nearly unseated Nadine. She gripped the wheel well’s hot metal sides and pushed the heels of her sneakers against the plastic ridges of the truck’s bed.
“Get off the thing,” hissed Jo, leaning across the swaying and still ashen-faced Smith. “You’re gonna fly out of the truck.”
“Shut up,” said Nadine. The thought of sliding down onto her butt, of abandoning Betty’s eye level, made her want to bare her teeth and snarl. It had been like this with Sam DiScalia on the lacrosse team, this sense that the first to show weakness would get her throat torn open. The early part was crucial.
They came around the rock ridge, the roar of the truck’s engine shifting and deepening as it braked on the downhill slope, and suddenly the world was green, the air cool and moist with clouds of water vapor left by whisking sprinklers. On either side of the road grass rioted ankle-high, not the saw-edged scrub Nadine had seen on their drive, but lawn grass, lush and overgrown. There were stands of sumac, too, and wild strawberries growing free among the nodding paintbrushes and white clover. As the truck slowed, tires crunching on the rutted gravel drive, Nadine made out the fat black-and-gold motes of bumblebees drifting between blossoms, and the iridescent shimmer of the hummingbirds that darted among them and hovered around plastic feeders with yellow imitation flowers into which they plunged their needle-thin beaks to drink.
This is impossible, thought Nadine, staring in openmouthed shock at a decorative fish pond beside which two counselors were talking on a wrought-iron bench. It must take so much water. The grass alone …
It was a crater, its slopes gently tiered, its overgrowth an assault on Nadine’s eyes after the barren rock and hardpan of the desert. It made no sense. Nothing grew out here but creosote and rocks. This was past irrigation, past anything Nadine knew about groundwater. She’d worked a few summers with the landscaping company partnered with her dad’s design firm, and no one in all of Arizona had been able to make anything like this, no matter how much they spent. As they got deeper in, she saw what looked like a salamander the size of a man’s shoe scurry out of the grass and into a little stream winding back and forth along the slope. Below, a crooked crabapple tree bloomed delicate pink beside a slant-roofed farmhouse, weeping petals from its branches where the gauzy webs of gypsy moths tented leaves and stems.
The truck ground to a halt, brakes squealing, in a little dirt lot at the depression’s base. From here it seemed they were much farther down than Nadine would have guessed, and without the sun in her eyes she could see other spikes and broken curtains of stone rising from the earth amid the overgrowth. Betty kicked the tailgate open and the other girls began to get out, stretching and muttering. In the tree’s shadow, wearing a dress of white linen buttoned all the way up to her chin, a woman stood waiting for them. She clasped her hands as they filed into the shade, a few of them looking up nervously at the gossamer webs sagging in the boughs above. Dark, hairy shapes squirmed within. “Good morning, girls,” she said.
It was the wispy little blond woman Nadine had seen onstage with Pastor Eddie. She looked older up close, the skin on the backs of her hands a little papery, lines radiating from the corners of her pallid eyes and rosebud mouth. She was also the skinniest person Nadine had ever seen. Her cheekbones were as sharp as razors, her cheeks gaunt hollows in their shadows. Even her hair was thin, her pink scalp visible through its combed waves. It made Nadine think of a baby mouse, new and bald and feeble.
“Good morning, Mrs. Glover,” Betty and the rest of her clique chorused, and for a moment they sounded so needy, so pitifully desperate for this shriveled cunt’s approval, that Nadine forgot to hate them. They were just stupid little babies.
“Mama,” said Enoch, taking off his baseball cap.
“Meredith,” said Cheryl.
The woman smiled. What little she showed of her teeth was a nightmare, gums receding from eroded brown and yellow stumps. “I hope you ladies aren’t afraid of a little hard work,” she said, turning to Nadine and the rest of the new campers in the group. She had a beautiful voice, high and soft and pure. She turned, leaning hard on her cane, and looked back at them over her shoulder, pale eyes narrowed, the house looming huge and still and silent beyond her. “Follow me.”
Felix followed the pinched little skeleton in through the front door. A long, narrow coatroom, hats and jackets on pegs, wood paneling giving way to stenciled wallpaper. The screen door banged shut behind them as Meredith led the group into the living room, which was full of the same spindly legged furniture Felix’s grandparents had in their trailer. A pea-green sofa bracketed by spidery end tables draped in lace, a faded azure love seat and its swaybacked ottoman. An old-fashioned television, antennae cocked at odd angles, stood before the curtained windows. A carpeted staircase set along the far side of the room led up the second floor, an oil painting of Pilate showing Christ to the mob hung halfway up it.
They split there, Cheryl dragging Felix and some of the others toward the clatter and boiling heat of the kitchen while Enoch and the rest—except for kiss-ass Betty, who went upstairs with all ninety pounds of her surrogate mommy—vanished deeper into the house’s sprawl. Sweat beaded on Felix’s forehead and upper lip as he followed Smith, Jo, and Nadine through an empty doorway and into the sweltering, breathless space.
Something hissed and crackled in the gigantic gas oven, the blandly meaty stink of it filling Felix’s nostrils. Peeling linoleum underfoot, a twin sink piled with filthy plates and crockery, dirty plastic compost buckets overflowing with eggshells and coffee grounds, potato skins and browning apple cores. A fat blond girl with her hair tied back under a red paisley kerchief was plucking a chicken at the little square table in the center of the room while another, dainty and curly-haired with a blue armband worn over her long-sleeve shirt, shelled peas over a paper bag.
There were muttered introductions—the two girls were Candace, the plucker, and Laurie, who seemed to Felix like one of Pastor Eddie and Mrs. Glover’s brownnosers—and then Cheryl put them to work. Methodically, as the girls chatted and Nadine half-assed her way through the dishes with much clattering and clanking, Felix scrubbed the floor. He filled a lacquered steel basin with hot water from the tap, Nadine elbowing him as she cleaned, and dug a filthy sponge from the cabinet under the sink. That was fine. Let her take her shit out on his ribs. She’d probably be bent over Pastor Eddie’s knee getting her ass belted raw by tomorrow.
He heaved the basin from the counter down to the floor and squeezed lemon-scented soap into the steaming water from a half-empty plastic bottle. His knees still ached from the morning run, but it was better to be down below the smells and the heat and the sounds of the girls’ voices, so hatefully like his own no matter how hard he fought to pitch it down, no matter how much smoke he breathed. Is this the scam? he wondered, squeezing excess water from the sponge and starting on the corner where the kitchen cabinets and the ones under the breakfast bar met. They drag us out here and make us do their housework? There had to be more convenient Mexicans around.
He missed the smell of his mother’s kitchen with a sudden chest-tightening fierceness. Paprika and vinegar, chilis and poblanos, bitter chocolate and onions simmering in butter. His father complained sometimes that her cooking was too Mexican, that it embarrassed him to bring his business partners home to her spicy oxtail stew, her pickled beef tongue and peppery machaca and eggs. Felix had heard her tell him once that he could always cook, if he was that ashamed of her. He’d bounced her head off the wall for that.
My father didn’t come to this country to eat like a fucking ranch hand. You hear me? You hear me?
It was always some version of that when the hitting started. Your grandfather didn’t come to this country so you could run around in khakis like a manflor. Your grandfather didn’t come to this country so you could bitch to me about Nintendos. Border crossing. Clothes on his back and shoes on his feet. Six to a room. Secret police. Cartels. When Felix had cut his hair, though, when he’d come out of the bathroom after their screaming fight with that hideous purple dress trailing in slashed and shredded strips from his hands, there had been no anecdote, no colorful commentary on the crimes of the Ordaz administration. Just Manny Vargas hurtling across the room and then those thick, soft hands tight around Felix’s neck and Leo shouting “Papa, Papa, get off her!” and the guests who’d come early screaming. And then the reeling stumble and the crash, the vase, Leo rolling on the carpet with his hands clamped over his eye and blood everywhere, blood staining everything, and their father bellowing like a bull with a spear in its side, bearing Felix down to the floor as a dozen pairs of hands tried to haul him back.
Stop thinking about this shit, he told himself, tensing his stomach muscles as he drew the sponge back toward himself. A clean streak gleamed wetly on the sticky floor. In three years you’ll be eighteen. You’ll leave for college. Someplace cheap in case he cuts you off. You can be a pussy once it’s over.
At the kitchen table Smith was snuffling miserably as she peeled potatoes, the skins spilling over the rim of the metal mixing bowl she held in her lap. Her flyaway hair was lank and colorless in the smothering heat that radiated from the oven. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying and Felix, still scrubbing, thought as he looked up at her that someday he would have a daughter, and the sight of her tears would not disgust him as the sight of Smith’s did, and she would be happy and free and she’d never daydream about beating his head into tomato sauce with an aluminum bat.
Someday.
Nadine heard footsteps from the living room. The sound was clear even over the rattle and crash of the dishes and the thin, whining wheeze of Smith’s crying. Heavy footfalls like a storybook giant’s. Fee fi fo fum, don’t do drugs, have sex, or cum. Pastor Eddie’s reflection appeared in the window over the sink, his huge frame filling the doorway. The bass rumble of his voice seemed to force all the air out of the kitchen.
“Everything under control here?”
“Yes, sir,” simpered curly-haired Dana, wiping her hands on her apron. “Cheryl just went out to talk to Mrs. Glover and Enoch. We’re finishing up the prep work now.”
“Good.” The giant stepped into the kitchen, the plywood under the linoleum creaking beneath his weight. A hand like a dinner plate came to rest on Nadine’s shoulder. She froze, fighting the urge to drive an elbow back into the pastor’s stomach and then turn and go for his eyes. He was huge, almost a foot taller than her and probably a hundred and fifty pounds heavier. He could pull her apart without trying.
“Why don’t you get that roast out, sweetheart?” he purred. She could feel his voice in her bones. “Smells just about done.”
