Truly Like Lightning Read online

  “Look at Clinton and the Dersh on the Epstein logbook,” Malouf said. “No bueno.”

  If Malouf was slightly peeved that Milman had brought his seven-year-old son along for the ride, he didn’t show it. Maya was aware of this type of behavior, where rich but not super-rich folk like Milman envied the big-boy toys of men with whom they sometimes fraternized. The Milmans would think the Maloufs didn’t deserve such luxury; Milman’s envy was in equal proportion to his hatred of Malouf, and he would act accordingly by partaking without gratitude. It was as if Milman knew, though he didn’t know exactly what the service he was providing was going to net Malouf, that it was most likely more than Milman would ever see in a lifetime, that he was being bought cheaply. So Milman was going to be sure to take as much free stuff as he could to even the scales a little.

  It reminded Maya of an old game show she saw stoned on TV Land one lonely night called The Diamond Head, where a contestant gets put in a glass booth, a modified wind tunnel called the Money Volcano or Cash-n-ator, that blows bills of all denominations (with one unicorn $10,000 bill) on jet engine gusts of air for a few seconds. The contestant has to grab, desperately and spastically, at the money as it flutters wildly about, an act way more difficult, and of course, tantalizing, than it seems—the money, the fortune in the air, floating like an apparition before your eyes. Like most American game shows, the funny at the heart of this was to reveal how people would humiliate themselves for money. In fact, Maya pondered, perhaps there is nothing more American than this, and she had googled the Cash-n-ator to find that it was actually, unsurprisingly, an arcade game, a staple of the carny, quite popular at bar mitzvahs. Your time in the Cash-n-ator was the American promise.

  The captain gave the boy some cheap metal wings for his lapel. The boy snatched at them, bought and sold. Malouf patted him on the head. They all turned and walked the small plank up and into Malouf’s Cash-n-ator for the short flight to San Bernardino.

  “Remember Typhoon? The restaurant that used to be here at the Santa Monica Airport?” Malouf asked as they settled in.

  “Yeah,” Milman said. “Didn’t they get busted and shut down for serving dolphin steaks or something?”

  “Not dolphin, only a true reprobate would eat Flipper—it was whale meat, and yes, that’s right.”

  “Put the chef in jail?”

  “The chef has paid his debt to mammals and completed his probation and community service, and he is a good friend of mine, and he has prepared the food for our little jaunt today, so, if I may, I’d like to offer you some of my favorites off the menu of the dearly departed Typhoon—scorpion toast.” Malouf made a maître d’ type flourish to the flight attendant.

  “Ah, thank you, Belinda,” he cooed, as the attendant placed a covered dish amid the four of them and lifted the top to reveal what looked exactly like shrimp toast only with the unmistakable form of a scorpion grilled perfectly into the bread like a fossil in stone.

  “Ew,” the boy said.

  “Don’t be a pussy, Jackson, eat the scorpion,” Milman said to his son as he took a bite of deep-fried arachnid.

  Malouf smiled like a dark lord, much as Hades must have when he saw Persephone eat those pomegranate seeds. Malouf winked at Maya to make sure she was learning the lessons, learning the small, flashy price for which most men would sell their souls. She watched as Belinda slid more dishes on the table.

  “Is that the whale meat?” asked Milman, pointing at a piece of sushi.

  “Heavens, no.” Malouf winked. “I’ll never tell. You two have things to talk about. I will take Jackson up to the cockpit, if that’s okay.” Maya noted how the very rich like Malouf loved to play at being deferential, using “sir,” asking permission obsequiously, seeming to assert their own power by this florid show of subservience. “This way, sir,” he said, and off he went with the boy.

  “So,” Maya asked Milman, delicately nibbling at a scorpion of her own, “how did it go with Powers?”

  “To be honest with you”—Milman’s mouth was so full that it was hard to make out his words above the engines—“those kids are getting an amazing education. I’d have no qualms sending his ten-year-old to a community college tomorrow, and his seven-year-old makes Jackson look like a fucking retard. I thought about leaving Jackson there for those Mormons to educate. Not only the books, but those kids were disciplined and polite, worked hard around the house, could hunt and shoot and cook—”

  Milman expelled what might’ve been a piece of scorpion from the back of his throat onto Maya’s cheek. She didn’t flinch. Rather, she nodded and smiled and wiped it away nonchalantly. But this was not good news, and Milman knew that.

  “Do you mind if I?” He reached for Maya’s piece of scorpion toast.

  “Be my guest,” she said.

  He continued stuffing his face with scorpion. This guy was a real asshole. He certainly hadn’t run for his position on the board of ed because of his great concern for the well-being of young minds and the $15K a year, but rather for moments precisely like this, where the uber-wealthy might need to court him when they were concerned about their uber-progeny. He continued, “Having said that, they also teach the kids a lot of crazy shit, fakakta Mormon shit that goes against public pedagogic policy, at least for now. Who knows what comes next if Trump gets impeached and that old prune Pence or some religious nutjob like that gets in. Separation of church and state, my ass. Depends on the fucking church. Though California is pretty independent of that shit, huh? It’s like we’re our own country within the borders of America. Fifth-largest economy in the world, bitches. We should secede.” Maya pursed her lips and nodded, trying to make Milman feel that she was impressed by his political awareness and trite, pithy aperçus.

  “I can wash my hands of it,” Milman said, his conscience clear or nonexistent, “doesn’t concern me what they do out there in that godforsaken shithole. If a Joshua tree falls in the desert and no one hears, did it fall? Who the fuck cares? Not the board of ed. I can’t speak for social services, however. Janey or whatever her name is. She’s a fucking cunt, a real do-gooder. But she’s a peon. Good luck with her. I think she already hates me. Do you think this is really orca meat, Free Willy? You can tell it’s mammalian, has that umami to it. Fuckin’ Malouf. You like working for him?” He took a big swig from a $400 bottle of sake, like it was 7UP, swished it around his mouth to dislodge any stray bits of spiny scorpion limb from his gums, and burped. “I hear a woman trying to get a job at Praetorian is like auditioning to become a Raelette, you know, a backup singer for Ray Charles, back in the day. You know?” He wanted her to be interested in his old-man stories, his exotic chronicles of a former world. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down. Maya had the urge to punch him in the forehead to make him stop. She wondered if he might like that.

  He knew she had to pay attention to him, if only for five minutes or so, and he was going to milk every one of those. He continued, “Ray Charles was a blind Black guy—singer. Like Stevie Wonder before Stevie Wonder. The Raelettes danced and sang behind him at the piano. Like a Supreme. You with me so far?”

  “I get the picture.”

  “So you know how you became a Raelette?”

  “I suppose you had to be able to sing,” she offered, blinking slowly to hint at her growing impatience.

  “Sure, that helps. But to really become a Raelette, you had to let Ray.” She forced a smile and nodded as he laughed at his own joke.

  “The good old days, huh?” she said.

  “Exactly.” He downed a big piece of sushi in one bite and chased it with more sake. “This shit is like butter, meat butter, wonder which whale it is, so good. I’m salivating like a Saint Bernard. We are all going to hell, might as well enjoy it.”

  Maya smiled to herself because Malouf was subtly acclimatizing Milman, through a series of micro transgressions, to being a partner in crime. He’d gotten this milquetoast douche to break the dietary law on the way to baby-stepping him to more serious offenses with
the unspoken promise that if he just continued to play small ball, this jet-setting, whale-eating lifestyle might be more available to him and his offspring.

  “Janet, not Janey. Janet Bergram.” Maya stared at the whale sashimi as Milman dipped it in the low-sodium soy sauce. “Here’s a hot tip—people like it when you get their names right.”

  Milman, realizing his five minutes were up, smirked. “Whatever.”

  “And don’t fucking say ‘cunt’ in front of me, asshole,” Maya scolded.

  That stopped him cold, open-mouthed and mid-chew. Maya could see the whale meat in his gullet. He swallowed and said, “My bad. Don’t get your knickers in a twist, snowflake. Don’t diss the messenger. Just saying she was a real Debbie downer.”

  Maya felt her ears pop with the change of altitude. In no time at all, they were descending into Luxivair at San Bernardino Airport, touching down for Janet Bergram, a short, stout, middle-aged African American woman in sensible shoes, and climbing back up into the sky. Malouf took one look at Janet Bergram and knew that she was immune to his light show, his Cash-n-ator, and his T-shirt cannons. “I trust the car service was okay?” Malouf smiled, putting a hand on her back, a hand that Janet turned her neck to actually look at as if a city pigeon had suddenly perched on her shoulder.

  “I took a cab,” she replied. Uh-oh, a cab? Who the fuck takes a cab? She really didn’t speak the language. She would not be impressed by scorpions or whales on her tray table. Malouf looked momentarily at sea. Maya hoped that he wouldn’t pull his “I’m a minority, too, I’m an Arab” shtick that she’d seen him do in such situations. She looked at him as if to say “I got this.”

  Even though he had to bend his neck in the low cabin ceiling of the jet, Malouf still loomed over Janet, getting close to her and using his height to force her to look straight up at him. “Make sure to give Maya a receipt for the cab and we will reimburse you.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  Malouf looked around for an exit like an actor who had forgotten how to get offstage, and then excused himself, disappearing back into the cockpit with Milman and Jackson.

  Maya felt the importance of letting Janet know she was not like Malouf. “Those shoes are so smart,” she said. “I wear these heels like an idiot all day.” The other woman nodded. She clearly had no interest in shoes, sensible or otherwise. Pushing aside the exotic, possibly illegal food, Maya dove right in.

  “What did you think of the Powers situation?”

  “Where are we going?” Janet asked.

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere. Where do you want to go?”

  Janet looked queasily out the window. “I don’t really like flying, upsets my stomach. What is that?” She pointed at Milman’s remains of scorpion and whale.

  “Scorpion toast,” Maya said, as if the outlandishly exotic can become the mundane in the course of a twenty-minute flight. Janet burped and repressed the urge to vomit. Maya jumped up and removed the leftovers.

  “I get it. Let’s be quick?” Maya sat back down and leaned in. “First of all, I want to let you know that Robert Malouf and Praetorian Capital is donating one hundred thousand dollars to the San Bernardino school system.”

  Janet nodded. The sum was not insignificant; it would make a small difference. If the rest of the day amounted to nothing, she could live with that. She thanked Maya, then said, “But I’m not going to be bought for a hundred thousand.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting…”

  “My sole job is to assess the welfare of the kids, right. The Powerses are a fascinating case. I don’t know anything, I don’t care anything about real estate, so please keep that damn fool, Milman, away from me.”

  “Exactly. I know. Done. He’s gonna get tossed from the plane when we’re over water.”

  Janet Bergram did not smile. “The kids are clean and well fed,” she said, “they seem to have plenty of attention. You’re not looking at a Turpin-type case. They are very different from their peers because they don’t share the same culture or cultural references, they don’t have phones or computers, though I don’t think that is necessarily a hardship.”

  “Nor do I,” Maya said, paying lip service to hating phones, as all adults do, right before buying the next model.

  “Here’s the law.” Janet dug in. “The state of California is not a fan of homeschooling. The state’s education code does not even explicitly mention homeschooling. There are relevant statutes, however. One—they’d need to establish a private school in their home. They have not done that. Two—they’d have to employ a private tutor or hold California teaching credentials themselves. Though they all seem capable of getting credentialed, they have not. Three—they would have to enroll their kids in a public school that offers independent study. Obviously, that hasn’t happened either. They’re supposed to keep a portfolio of the kids’ work. I asked for that. They didn’t have a portfolio per se, but they showed me some beautiful work. I was very impressed by their levels across the board. Those kids are being educated rigorously, if somewhat idiosyncratically. Again, you mentioned the Turpin family and the Angulos … this is nothing like that. The kids are outside all the time, very healthy. I saw no evidence of what I would deem child abuse, though you have this polygamous situation with the multiple wives, which is certainly … unorthodox.”

  “And illegal,” Maya added. But she had anticipated this soft left-of-center censure. She knew that the Powers kids were being educated well. She knew that the mission statement for San Bernardino Child and Family Services was “to protect endangered children, preserve and strengthen families, and develop alternative family settings.” With that absence of imminent danger in mind, Maya knew Janet Bergram most likely wouldn’t suggest removing them from their home, and that if the Powerses decided to call Praetorian’s bluff, they might very well walk away with the whole pot. But this was the most direct, prosaic approach, and Maya figured it wouldn’t be that easy. So she tacked back.

  “Do you know the Mormon bible actually teaches the inferiority of dark-skinned races?” Maya asked, knitting her sugar-threaded brow in disapproval.

  “Yes, I do,” Janet said. “But beyond their amazement at seeing another human being for the first time in years, the looks I got from those kids were not the kinds of looks I get from a lot of white kids in the San Bernardino school system.”

  “What do you mean? They looked at me like I was from Mars.”

  “They looked at me like I was from another planet, too. Healthy curiosity. But none of those Mormon kids looked at me like I was a nigger.” The word landed like a slap. Maya wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that looks like,” Maya said. An awkward silence followed that Janet was content to extend. Maya added, “They shot an arrow at me.”

  “What?”

  Maya showed Janet the scar on her upper arm. Janet pursed her lips. “Well, I guess you win, but unless you wanna file charges and try to get a felony case going, I don’t see how that justifies taking the kids away from their parents. And I can’t say, won’t say for certain, that those kids would be better off, by any quantifiable metric, removed from their present caregivers. I think it’s a waste of time. For me. I have cases in San Bernardino that are much, much worse and more pressing. Do you have any idea how many cases I am working at the moment?”

  “Well, I do know that the standard recommended caseload for your position is, what, thirty to forty-five?”

  “Yes, exactly. I have sixty-seven. The Powerses would be ten more.”

  “Right, ten kids.”

  “I’d like to close the Powers case because of the sixty-seven other families. More than a hundred and fifty children whose lives and futures depend on me doing my job every day and not flying around in a private jet. I have one young boy of six whose job it was to feed his dad’s prize-fighting pit bull. The dog lost some weight ’cause the kid would forget to feed him sometimes. The dog lost a fight and had to be put down. The father d
ecided to teach the kid a lesson by having him trade places with the dog. The kid was forced to sleep outside in a small shed with a collar on and eat dog food for a month.” Maya shook her head, dumfounded by the cruel stupidity.

  “Now multiply that by a hundred and fifty,” Janet added.

  Maya was on her heels. “I appreciate your concern for your community. And I share it.”

  “You do? Have you ever set foot in San Bernardino? I mean, I know you’ve flown over it…” Janet smirked.

  “Yes, I have.” Maya did her best to ignore the sarcasm. “And be assured that we would love to help, that our use of the land nearby will create thousands of temporary jobs and hundreds of permanent ones, and bring billions into the community.”

  “Like Walmart. Yeah, I heard the pitch.”

  “Yes, like Walmart, but even better. But we have to get there first, move into the neighborhood, which brings us back to the Powers kids—are they being prepared to be adults, to enter into the world and the workplace? I mean, aside from being taught those fucked-up anti-science and racist beliefs, which might be seen as abusive.”

  “Yes, in the age of Trump, unfortunately, neither those anti-scientific idiocies or the pseudo-scientific racial ideas are so far out of the mainstream that we don’t see public schools pressured in certain parts of the country to, say, teach creationism along with evolution, and certainly some private schools, walking, or rather tiptoeing or dog whistling, up to that same line. Children being used as pawns and test cases in adult culture wars.”

  “That’s a shame,” Maya said, and she meant it. Janet was nodding skeptically, alert to the cant of this line of anti-racist argument parroted back to her from this young white woman.

  “Would they be better off in a public school in San Bernardino? Maybe. Maybe not,” Janet wondered. “I’m inclined to look the other way and let the situation remain as is.”

  Maya asked, “And who decides, ultimately, you or the law?”