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  “I thought you were my Wharton gal, my numbers guy, my face man, my play-by-the-book gal. This is biting and fighting— street-fighter shit.”

  “I’m both. All of it.”

  “This makes me happy and sad.”

  Malouf swiveled his chair to face the window. Maya imagined he was looking all the way to the water, and beyond that to Hawaii, where he owned a beautiful property on Kauai that he often spoke of like a spiritual retreat but never visited, his tropical Lake Isle of Innisfree. And staring past that unused haven to God knows what.

  “You know why I love the water?” he mused, as if they were old friends.

  “Don’t you surf?” she asked, bringing up one of the many rumors about Malouf that lingered about him like a halo. The worshipful Young Turks would sometimes compete in who could ascribe the most outlandish talents and feats to their mysterious boss, like those “most interesting man in the world” commercials. Malouf taught Kelly Slater how to surf. Malouf raised mink in Russia with Putin. Malouf was the actual inventor of the margarita. Malouf was the Zodiac Killer. Malouf was the sailor about whom the ’70s hit “Brandy” was written. Malouf taught Chuck Norris how to fight.

  “Oh no, I can’t swim.” He said, “I grew up poor. Poor people don’t learn how to swim—that’s extra. I have two yachts now, though, you’ll come out with me sometime, on the Santa Maria—that’s the nicer one—on the water, so I like to go on it, but not in it.” He had invited her on the yacht. That was like the bar mitzvah for Praetorian Young Turks. It marked that she had come of age, was worthy. She swelled with feeling.

  “But,” he continued, “you know why I love to work where I can always see the water?”

  She was growing a little antsy about this sudden detour, and hoping Malouf was momentarily waxing philosophical before flashing his capitalist claws again, simply creating a backstory or moral narrative to make the kill palatable. He continued in what was for him a deep and poetic vein, “I love it ’cause it’s always changing, yet always the same—you know what I mean? See for yourself.”

  Maya got up and went to stand behind Malouf. She looked past his shaved shiny head out to the Eternal Mother—and there she was, the end of America, waiting, rolling in and rolling back, changing every moment, always the same.

  “Like people,” he said. “You gotta look past the movement, the smoke and mirrors, the waves—to see their unchanging essence.” He seemed to have mesmerized himself. “The ocean always tells me the same thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re a dead man, Malouf. I got your fucking finger, and I’ll have the rest soon enough. Soon you’ll be gone and I’ll keep rolling along.” Each statement was emphasized by a graceful hand gesture like a wave gently breaking. “Nothing matters. What are you staring at, you bald, nine-fingered piece of shit? Fuck you.”

  She tried to lighten him up. “Wow, the ocean’s kind of a dick.”

  “Yeah, but it makes me happy, puts me in the right decision-making frame of mind.”

  She was a little confused about his weird mood change and what this oblique gabfest demanded of her. Was she supposed to massage his shoulders now? Tell him she’d heard Sternlicht wore a hairpiece and had ED? Or that Schwarzman wears lifts? Tell him that he’s immortal too, especially if he does this deal? That his wasteful lifestyle, polluting businesses, and heedless energy consumption may very well kill this nemesis, the ocean, in which he cannot swim, in his lifetime? Would that be a happy thought for such a man so afraid of death? That his name and his monuments will outlast the rapidly warming, fished-out, soul-sick sea?

  Theoretically, Maya cared more about the health of the planet and its animals: she drank her margarita rocks through a metal straw. But she also didn’t understand why she had to curtail her use of God’s green earth just because the generations before had been so profligate. She would look for ways to be more conscious, greener, eventually, but first she had to score. Like a boyfriend or a husband or children, the Green New Deal could wait until she was sitting pretty on her nest egg. She realized her own sliding hypocrisy on the matter, and that made her feel bad, but not bad enough to spur action or change. Once she had power and some security and eyes on her, then she would lean in, make a turn to the good, to charity and conservation. Like Bill Gates. Like a reverse Koch bro. More like the self-made version of Bezos’s ex.

  Malouf turned away from the Pacific to face Maya once again. “I know the perfect board of ed guy; he’s been wanting to get on the Praetorian board forever, too. If I dangle that, he will do what I tell him. I’ll get you guys together. Maybe you can figure it out, Killer.” The water had whispered to him. He was in.

  “You’re amazing. Perfect,” she said.

  “I am? I am.”

  Maya bent down and spontaneously kissed the top of his small oblong head, like you might a beloved dog or a small child. Immediately, she felt wrong and awkward. She was in his space now, too close. Malouf took another long pause—he seemed almost on the verge of tears—then he continued, “After I get you guys together, though, I’m gonna stand back and trust you, Killer. I won’t know the details of what you’re doing, and I don’t wanna know. You’ll be on the hook, morally, the face, the face of this company, till we make a deal. If asked, you’ll deny that I’m involved in any details, you were a rogue agent, I knew nothing. Only speak to me of this deal in person and in private. Do not text or email me about it. And absolutely no fucking paper. Don’t even call me to talk about it, only face-to-face, mano a womano. If it works out, I’ll take care of you, believe you me.”

  “Believe you me” was another of Malouf’s verbal tics. It was a bit of an archaic phrase, but Maya liked it; it felt almost like a homey mantra to her; it made sense beyond its grammatical brevity, like a circular haiku. You believe me, I believe you, believe you me—both a promise and a threat. She knew that any man who habitually used such a phrase about his own trustworthiness was not a man to be trusted, yet it comforted her to be asked about her belief, her trust. Even though she really didn’t have much of a choice, her belief had already been sold to this strange, bottomlessly needy man when she joined Praetorian and accepted his money.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” she said.

  “If it goes south, you’ll take the brunt. I’ll be a fucking vapor. You can trust that, too. Believe you me.”

  “Of course.”

  They stayed quite still, both nodding, but breathing quickly and deeply now, like they’d run a relay race together and pushed through the tape ahead of the pack. He extended his large, leathery, manicured hand. She took it and shook it. It was surprisingly tough and callused, probably from wielding a polo mallet.

  “Show me.” He tilted his chin at her.

  “Show you what?”

  “You know, Killer. Show me.”

  He was teasing, raising his Muppet eyebrows. She clocked that he was now calling her “Killer,” which was a damn sight better than HH. She also noted that it made her nipples hard. She hoped her bra was thick enough to hide those stigmata. Wait, show him what? Her tits?

  “The tat,” he said.

  Oh. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal the newborn snake. The needle scabs had recently shed for good, the skin molted and healed. The snake was smooth and permanent. She was fearless.

  8.

  THIS WAS THE THIRD early morning in a row that a Scott’s oriole had perched outside Mother Mary’s bedroom window, singing. It was rare to see these tiny yellow-and-black beauties anywhere but in the arms of a Joshua tree, so Mary had been delighted the first dawn when the distinctive, gentle song stirred her and she had opened her own eyes to find the jet-black eyes upon her, the shy little shadow of a head swiveling and questioning on her windowsill, just inches away. But three days in a row? And uncharacteristically, unnaturally even, before any true morning light. She wasn’t one for omens. She left the interpretation of signs and wonders to Bro’ and his peep stones, but this seemed like God was slapping her upside the head
. What could it mean?

  She looked over at Yaya sleeping beside her. Who was this old woman? This woman she had come to love deeply and completely—the source of such physical pleasure and companionship—was old. She remembered the Talking Heads song—“this is not my beautiful wife.” Sometimes her mind was like an oldies radio station (for the music that she grew up loving would surely be oldies by now). It had been years since she’d actually, physically heard any of the songs on her daily mental playlist, only Beatles Beatles Beatles, and yet still her mind played deep tracks in familiar rotation, the groove of her memory imagined like the spiral groove of a vinyl record.

  One little bird. She recalled Bob Marley sang of three. She missed reggae. She missed Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, wondered if he was still alive. She’d seen him in concert, so frail, colorless thin blond hair framing the big teeth, sneering but gentle; he was ugly and pretty up there, fully in command, barking, “You don’t have to live like a refugee.” Maybe Bro’ was right, maybe songs were Trojan horses, shiny shells overpacked with marauding significance. Was she living like a refugee? She had learned over the years to be vigilant about smuggling evils unaware into their spiritual paradise, but contaminants crouched in her memory, waiting.

  “The waiting is the hardest part.” Oh, shut up, Tom. The oriole flew away, her job done, her indecipherable message delivered. Mary got out of bed quietly so as not to disturb her sister-wife.

  ’Twas fuckin’ chilly. She’d never gotten used to how cold and sharp the mornings were in the desert. She’d never admit it, but it hurt her bones more and more. She felt her face as she brushed her teeth; the lines by her eyes and in the grooves around her mouth felt deeper today than yesterday even. She knew this could not be so, change did not happen so quickly, and that such a thought must be an indication of some sick state of mind or weakness. There were no mirrors here or anywhere in the home. Sure, there were windows from which she could coax a reflection, but that was a swimmy, unclear, forgiving image for the most part, or easily dismissed as a funhouse mirror obviously warped. Even so, Mary could tell she had gotten old too, like Yaya. The drying out and destruction of her youth by the relentless Mojave sun and time were almost welcome to Mother Mary. Almost. She drove a fingernail questioningly into the lines around her eyes, trying to put a human measurement on time, to plumb the depths of change.

  So Mary knew that without mirrors, or boys her own age for that matter, her child Pearl had no idea how beautiful she had become. There were times when Bro’ was out in the desert communing with his uncommunicative God, and Mary would brush Pearl’s hair by the big window in the kitchen, angling the girl so she might see herself, tempting her to behold the power of the postadolescent beauty announcing itself, sculpted as if by a great artist out of stone as the baby fat left her face. Mary waited to punish the girl for her vanity, but Pearl would only stare blankly, mind elsewhere, unreadable, and then her reflected eyes would shift to meet Mary’s in the clear glass, the big empty desert still visible in the frame beyond. Asking. Asking what? Am I beautiful? Why am I beautiful? Where did your beauty go? What does beauty mean? What is all this beauty for?

  The magnitude of Pearl’s beauty felt dangerous to Mary, like a temptation of God himself. Mary was both proud and terrified of it. She wanted Bronson to bring back sunscreen from one of his trips into the city, to protect against damage, but she refrained from asking for fear he would interpret it as this pride for herself, or for the children. She was so grateful to Bro’ for this life, for his vision; she wanted him to know this, and her devotion to him, to Mormonism, was her daily, living evidence. Now she was a Christian again as she had been as a child; that’s what she was, what she had become to save herself and her child, Beautiful. And unlike Yalulah, she had never once ventured beyond their property in the intervening years. She knew herself better than to do that. She had never had any boundaries, as a child or adult, such concepts were all or nothing to her; if she left, if she colored outside the lines she had been given, there was nothing but chaos on the other side, and drugs. And if she sometimes looked at a cactus and thought, How the fuck can I make tequila out of that? she could be forgiven. She was forgiven.

  But it was a health issue too, the sun, wasn’t it? Skin cancer. If it be Thy will, she supposed. A hard pill for a parent to swallow. As often as she could, though, she made Pearl and Beautiful and the other kids wear wide-brimmed hats. All the kids, but especially Pearl. Pearl didn’t like to wear one. Pearl didn’t like to be hidden, in shadow.

  Mary slipped into her ancient, tan, fleece-lined Ugg boots, her one extravagance. She demanded that Bronson bring her new ones from civilization whenever a pair shredded after several years of active mornings. Silently, she padded through to the part of the house she called the ‘kids’ wing.’ There they all were sleeping, the whole brood, except for Hyrum, of course. That wild child might’ve slept outside for all she knew, looking in the rain-shadow desert for rattlesnake eggs that he would fry for a breakfast none of the other kids would eat. Lovey, Beautiful, Little Joe, Little Big Al, Effy, Palmyra, Solomona. All ten accounted for and breathing the new day, except for Hyrum. And Pearl. Deuce, yes, but no Pearl. Maybe Pearl was a-milking. She was “an American girl.” Okay, okay, Tom, I hear you, now fuck off.

  Mary glided as silently as a ghost on her soft Uggs, thinking of Pearl and the uncanny collages she used to make from the colorful paper coverings of the canned goods Bronson would bring back from his trips to town. Those familiar, even nostalgic, labels were mere background noise to Mary but magical to the girl, her only contact with the world, and you could see her puzzling through the images that had no referents for her—gluing them, recombining them, painting over them, looking for clues and expressing her desires like in those hostage notes made from magazine snippets in the movies. The impressive kid had kind of reproduced a Warhol Pop Art sensibility without ever having seen a Warhol. Mary didn’t know what the girl was trying to say about the world, but she knew she was interested in it. Maybe that’s what she was saying.

  Mary found herself approaching the back bedroom where Bronson spent his nights alone more and more the past few years, and, as quietly as she could, opened the creaky door. She was surprised to see Pearl first, on her side facing the door, sleeping. That was curious, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark and took in the rest of the room, she had the sense of a dread prophecy being fulfilled. The meaning of the oriole’s song. For beside Pearl in bed, incongruously, was an old man. That was her first thought. There’s something wrong with this picture. The old man she knew was Bronson Powers.

  Pearl opened her eyes and looked at Mary, sleepy, guiltless, and free. The girl’s face was radiant, flush, the skin on her chin chafed a bit and red, not from sun, but from kissing maybe. Pearl held her mother with clear, challenging eyes, unblinking, seeming to communicate—There is nothing wrong with this. What did you expect? What else is there for me? He saved us both. There is no other. I am a woman now, a beautiful woman. This is not my father. This is as natural as the sun rising right now, and the animals eating each other and fucking each other. As natural and real as blood, as the blood that flows from me monthly. I love and I am loved. This is no lie. This is the covenant. This is the truth. This. This. This!

  This is what all this beauty is for.

  Mother Mary lowered her gaze, took a step back, and closed the door. It was a while before she could move. She felt hypnotized, and gone away to some place deep and still in her mind. When she came back to herself, she was in the kitchen in the middle of making breakfast. For the first time in years her hands were shaking uncontrollably. She cut her finger slicing the bread. She watched it bleed.

  9.

  THE BIG MAN HIMSELF, in his prized whip, a Bianco Icarus Metallic Lamborghini Aventador, drove Maya to Santa Monica Airport. This was the most expensive car Maya had ever been in, dwarfing the sticker price of the Maserati she stole that night in the desert. A mere five-minute drive from the Praetorian off
ices, they were ushered through a private gate. Malouf drove the half-million-dollar car straight up to a multimillion-dollar jet on the tarmac, door to door, or rather, car door to jet door.

  Outside the plane, waiting with the two pilots and the one air attendant, was Randy Milman, an old friend of Malouf’s and very minor real estate player who happened, strategically, to hold an elected seat on the board of education. A week or so ago, Milman had paid a visit to the Powers property out by Joshua Tree to eyeball the compound. He had gone with a local from San Bernardino social services to see how the kids were being treated, and how they were being educated.

  Malouf didn’t want to have a download meeting with Milman in his office, so they were getting on the jet only to talk, and to fly down to Luxivair SBD, the private facility at San Bernardino Airport where they’d pick up Janet Bergram, the social service worker, and get the skinny from her as well.

  Malouf liked doing what he considered risky business off-site. In the Praetorian offices proper, he was not solely a private citizen, he was CEO, and there were rules that applied in a business office that could bite him in the ass. A mile high—different story. He also knew what a strong persuader a private jet was to a regular Joe, a big shiny thumb on the scale, and he was a firm believer in his own person-to-person charm. Most people would not want the ride to end, and they might say and do things to keep the ride going. This is what Malouf explained to Maya on the way to the hangar as the reason for this flight to San Bernardino and nowhere. “People are simpler than you think, they’re like birds,” he said.

  “They like being up in the air?”

  “No, Killer,” he replied, “they like shiny things.” He also knew that accepting a ride on a private jet could lead to a compromising position for most anyone, and the logbook for the Praetorian plane would record these four passengers to be recalled, or buried, perhaps when needed.