Truly Like Lightning Read online

  “Fuck all of you!” Pearl screamed. She kicked at the horse she was astride. The animal took off in a gallop, skidding up an angry spray of sand, jumped the fence, and soon vanished into the distance.

  “Pearl!” Mary called after her.

  “Leave her be,” Bronson said, with a touch a venom. “She’ll be back; she got nowhere to go.” Then Bronson turned back to Maya.

  “I think it’s going well so far, don’t you? One more, right? A young one, you wanted. You have two seventeen-year-olds, you want, like a ten-year-old? Ephraim? Three for the price of one. You want another girl? How about your girl, Mother Mary? Would that satisfy you? How about Beautiful? Beautiful?”

  Two kids, Ephraim and Beautiful, stepped forward. Mary seemed to try to rein in any reaction, but she was wringing her hands so hard that Maya could see little specks of blood start to seep from her knuckles.

  Maya looked at the kids. Her vision was blurry. She realized she was crying. She wiped at her eyes to clear them only to rub sand in from her fingertips and tear up some more. Bronson handed her a kerchief; the musk of it repulsed her. When she could see again, Maya thought she might throw up. Maybe she should have, but she hadn’t anticipated a scene like this. She couldn’t think. All she could see was the fucking kid with that fucking bow and arrow, the kid that had shot at her, Hyrum. It was the only name she was sure of among all the nutty Mormon and made-up hippie names. “Hyrum?” she said.

  Now everything got fast. Maya heard the horse behind her make a weird high-pitched noise and rear up; she felt the air switch at her back. She watched Hyrum, impossibly fast, like watching a movie with frames missing, string an arrow on his bow and take a knee, aiming it at Maya’s heart. She heard Mary yell, “Hyrum! No!” as mothers have done throughout eternity when their sons are about to do something violent and stupid. Maya couldn’t turn, but heard the ranger, behind her in the distance, yell and start running toward them, pulling out his gun, bringing it up to aim at the boy, she assumed. She saw that in her mind’s eye, she knew it must be happening. Maya felt herself entering a kind of special time, like a sacred time; she felt both present and absent from her body and mind, somewhere between the here and now and a premonition of things to come.

  Now everything got slow. Maya saw the boy’s fingers gently release, like setting free a bird, she watched the arrow fly at her, she felt she could see it from 360 degrees; even though time slowed, she had no time to move. The aim was true. She was dead. She knew she was going to die right now. That the boy had tried to kill her before, and now he was going to finish the job. She kept her eyes open and waited for the sting of the arrow through her flesh to her heart, hoped it would be quick and not too painful, hoped it wouldn’t get her in the face. Did she deserve it? She was simply trying to make money, make a life. Was that a sin, the sin? Was this justice for the pain caused by splitting up this odd family? She thought briefly but completely of the things she would not do in life. Children. See Greece. See Hamilton. She should’ve had more ice cream. Her Equinox-toned ass was about to be a useless accessory on a corpse, a thing of the past, worm food. She thought of her own father, hoped to see him again, if there was an afterlife. She keyed on the sound of the shaft as it flew nearer to her, ripping the air, and then, curiously, impossibly it seemed, missed her, continued past, and made a sticking sound a few feet behind her left ear.

  It was only then that she heard the rattle. She turned, and there in the dirt, in front of the spooked horse still rearing and stomping its hooves, stuck into the ground wriggling, bleeding, and dying, was a big, angry rattlesnake inches from her leg. The snake stopped writhing and died, pinned by the arrow through its open, attacking mouth, like a science-room specimen, through its small brain to the earth.

  Maya turned from the snake back to look at the boy. Hyrum was still on one knee, left arm extended in a fist clutching the bow, right fingers in a cocky freeze frame, elbow high by his ear where he had released the bowstring. He had a smile on his face and a full quiver, less one, so sure of his first shot that he hadn’t even reloaded.

  PART II

  FAST TIMES AT RANCHO CUCAMONGA HIGH

  When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way

  From your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day.

  —STEPHEN SONDHEIM, WEST SIDE STORY

  11.

  THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 6 did not feel momentous, like it would mark the dividing line between two seasons; it seemed no different from the rest of that dry, hot summer in Rancho Cucamonga, a city of slightly more than 175,000 souls in San Bernardino County, California.

  It was still near triple digits in this low desert city that had hit #42 on Money magazine’s “Best Places to Live” list in 2006. Summer songs (the inescapable “Old Town Road”) still blasted from cars on the main street (quaintly named “Mainstreet”) like everyone was trying to keep it mid-July. The better the car, and there were many Porsches and Ferraris in the hands of wannabe gangsta teenagers, the louder the speakers, the bigger the bass. Up in LA, Lebron and the Anthony Davis–loaded Lakers were rounding into shape at the Staples Center and the Dodgers were looking good for another postseason run. Sunny business as usual all across Southern California. If there was a chill in the air at all, it was mental, for school was about to restart, marking the end of something for all the kids and the adults whose brains had been patterned by the programmed ebb and flow of a school calendar.

  But not so for the transplanted Powers kids moving into a four-bedroom house (rented by Praetorian for $3,200 a month) on the 6000 block of Catania Place, which was a short drive, even walking distance from Rancho Cucamonga High School (one of the city’s three high schools crammed within five miles of one another), where the kids had been enrolled for the coming year. Their desert brains were free of civilized tides, these sons and daughters of nature; there would be no familiar segue, this was a before and after as stark as BC and AD. The first day of school would be tomorrow for Deuce, Pearl, and Hyrum, and they really had no idea what to expect.

  When they had moved into the Catania Place house in mid-August to “acclimate,” like divers from the depths, it was the first time any of the kids had had their own room. This, then, the mere shutting of a door behind you in solitude, was already a revolution in consciousness for the three. So whatever “culture shock” was expected and forecast, mundane stuff like that, like never having actually been alone unless you walked yourself out into the desert alone, Mary considered a shift in perspective so fundamental that it was impossible to predict the rippling repercussions. She thought of the phrase “fish out of water” for them all. But then she didn’t like that, because fish die out of water, they suffocate, don’t they? What a stupid saying. They were more like half a pride of lions airlifted from the savannah and deposited without warning in the suburbs.

  Maya had chosen, with an invisible assist from Janet Bergram, Rancho Cucamonga because Rancho Cucamonga High was one of the top-ranked schools in San Bernardino County. All of its public high schools had earned the “Silver” distinction in the 2015 rankings by U.S. News & World Report, and had been named California Gold Ribbon Schools by the California Department of Education. They had decided that the city of San Bernardino, Janet’s proper bailiwick, with its Walmart jobs and warehouses, minimum-wage gigs, and families scraping by with multiple jobs, would be too much of a shock to the system for the kids to thrive in. Janet’s endgame, so different from Maya’s, was to wait in the weeds, and then call attention to the needs of the local kids and the underserved local public schools, and in fact, San Bernardino had filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy as recently as 2012. But Janet also knew that the best way to “win” would be to enroll the Powers kids at a school that was already highly functioning. Janet’s hope was to employ a successful superstar public school to prevail in this unorthodox test, and then call attention to the more needy, less thriving schools. Janet had secured a promise from Maya that if Praetorian won, they would pour a portion of their winning
s into the neighborhoods and schools that were the most resource-starved in the county, especially in terms of jobs at a possible resort to be built.

  Maya wanted the best school available. Even though the Powers kids were well ahead of even college graduates in history (up until 1968) and world literature (same)—seems they’d read five hundred books to every one of their peers—and practical engineering, there were exploitable gaps in biology, sociology, advanced mathematics—sciences in general. Those gaps were what Maya hoped to capitalize on and see great advancement in over the year.

  But the biggest weakness that Maya saw she could take advantage of was the kids’ inability, never having sat through a situation remotely like it, to do well on a standardized test like an ACT or an SAT. The poor scores the Powers kids posted when they sat their first standardized test in July reflected not on their intelligence or preparation, but only that they were not used to being tested like that. Maya knew this, and merely by exposing the kids over the year to these tests that essentially measured standardized learning, she would be able to see and claim huge, though mostly illusory, educational gains for the kids in town.

  Mary’s “adult” acclimation was confusing in a different way. If the children were dealing with the shock of the new, she was dealing with the shock of the old. After lying low indoors in the air-conditioning for a couple days, staring out the windows at the people like they were fish in an aquarium, the family had ventured out on walks around the neighborhood, a visit to the school grounds, and an adventure to a food court at the mall. Walking past the stores in the Victoria Gardens mall, Mary, Deuce, Pearl, and Hyrum looked at once entranced and overstimulated, like Walking Dead zombies with ADHD, two pop culture references that would be lost on the group. There was too much of everything—too much choice, too much color, too many smells, too many people, and too many sounds. Deuce said his ears hurt. The children had lived such a quiet life before, literally quiet, that their ears were no doubt physically pained by the synesthetic immersion. She could see Hyrum occasionally recoil from an invisible assault; he was troubled because he could “hear the light.”

  Hy’s coping strategy seemed to consist of shouting “Cucamonga!” at maximum volume, as if to keep the town itself at bay, every few minutes. This was even after Deuce explained to him that kukamonga meant “sandy place” to the Tongva Indians who originally settled the area, and that it wasn’t the dirty word that Hyrum hoped it was. That knowledge didn’t dissuade Hyrum from using it as an all-purpose expletive.

  Mary noticed Deuce becoming aware of the girls prowling around Victoria Gardens with their Dior sunglasses and fake Louis Vuittons in small, high-pitched packs of four or more. This immediately made him self-conscious, and she caught him a number of times checking out his own reflection in the many windows and mirrors of this mall. Comparing himself with the other boys, so many of whom had tattoos and piercings, sporting angular, dyed haircuts, Deuce felt self-conscious for the first time, as he compared his floppy long hair and his Charlie Brown shirt (picked out by Mary at Target because of Deuce’s love of the Schulz comic strip) that even he could tell were not hip. An innocent, Deuce wouldn’t know to call this self-consciousness, however; he was aware of the creeping compare/despair only by its telltale physical manifestations—jumpy, sour in the stomach, cold sweats. When he looked in one of the omnipresent mall mirrors, he saw reflected back a maybe decent-looking, pimply young man who dressed like a ten-year-old. He flashed a sideways peace sign at himself, mimicking a pose he had seen in other boys, and stuck out his tongue. Pearl saw him mugging and punched him in the arm. Hyrum shouted, “Cucamonga!”

  The local kids at the mall were so loud, and struck such confusing, unnatural postures, constantly taking pictures, pulling faces, of themselves with their phones, flashing peace signs among a seemingly infinite array of hand gestures. Like they had all gone to the same frenetic, semaphoring gestural finishing school. Mary thought the girls dressed like hookers or mortician’s assistants and the boys dressed like they’d all once been very fat, their pants falling off their asses, exposing their designer underwear, or had once been very thin, their tight, stretchy jeans seemingly Saran-wrapped to their asses. Well-meaning Janet had given the Powers kids lectures on the microsocial, tribal world of school that they had never navigated—the emos, the jocks, the nerds, the preps, etc.—a literally foreign language falling on deaf ears; she also tried to teach them about macrosocial media and phones, the culture of Netflix and chill. The kids had stared at her blankly. They had no reference points, no abstract schema by which way to contemplate even the theoretical—they’d never watched television. They’d never even seen a toaster. Agadda da Vida was fewer than one hundred miles away, but this was life on Mars.

  Janet Bergram found herself drawn to check in on the family, even though she was off the case, which was “closed.” And though she didn’t have the time to spare, she made time. She felt a certain responsibility here, so she visited in a nonprofessional capacity, as a “friend.” Mary appreciated it. Maya seemed to Mary too young to relate to in many ways, and Janet knew her shit, knew kids, and knew the area. Seeing the disengagement of the children, Janet had pulled Mary aside and said, “You’ve got your work cut out for you, and it may seem daunting as hell right now, but I will be available to you, and if there’s one thing I know about kids, they’re resilient, they’re like saplings, they bend and do not break. I’ve seen kids raised on television and Sugar Pops make it back and lead productive lives. Your kids are not ignorant, they’re innocent, inexperienced, that’s a big difference, and they’re smart, and they’ve been loved, which is the biggest game changer, love; just keep loving them, they’re gonna be okay. I have a degree in child psychology, a master’s in social work, and a law degree—I’m a phone call away.”

  Mary kept nodding dumbly for too long after Janet had stopped speaking. “But the way you’re looking at me right now,” Janet tried to lighten up, “I’m more worried about you than them.”

  “I’m no sapling.” Mary sighed, then she asked, without a hint of humor, “What’s Netflix?”

  Even though they ambulated forward in a tight group, like a pack of prey animals making a circle of themselves for protection against predators, there was no way to mitigate the attention that Pearl received. From boys her own age, for sure, but, sickeningly for Mary, she caught an inordinate number of grown men eyeballing her seventeen-year-old daughter, some while strolling around with children of their own. Mary didn’t sense that Pearl was made uncomfortable by the attention. In fact, troublingly, she seemed to respond more readily to the ogling of the older men than that of her peers. Mary felt a deep pang of remorse, but she summoned up an equal resolve to fight as best she could. She didn’t know how to fight it, she just knew she would fight. For his part, Hyrum kept pulling at the neck of his Old Navy T-shirt, complaining that it was strangling him.

  Mary was already worried about Hyrum. He had developed a full body rash from either the synthetic materials his body had never encountered, or the additives in the detergent they used. They had had to bring him to the doctor anyway to get inoculated for polio, measles, and rubella. The other two kids had been born in civilization, and had, by matter of course in their infancy, had their shots. But not Hyrum. As the apologetic doctor sank needle after needle into him, Mary watched the boy ball up his fist. She took his clenched hand in hers. The doctor never had a clue how close he was to getting smacked.

  On the way out, Hyrum was given a red lollipop by the kind nurse, and Mary watched his pupils dilate as he tasted processed sugar for the first time in his life. After a couple of tentative licks, he held the sweet at arm’s length, beholding it from every angle as if trying to determine its power. So many new things under the sun, Mary thought, I can’t protect them from all of it; I can’t protect them at all.

  “You like that lollipop?” she’d asked him.

  “Lollipop?” he repeated, smirking at the silly word. “Yeah, why is it so red?�
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  “Red dye number two,” Mary heard herself say, surprised to recall an FDA controversy from her deep, unused memory and youth.

  In fact, all week she’d been assaulted ceaselessly by memories she hadn’t accessed in years. Everything out here reminded her of everything else she thought she had forgotten. She felt cured of a pleasant type of amnesia. Now her brain seemed like someone else’s, full, pulsing uncomfortably past her skull. Her mind reminded her of a hummingbird, even sounded like a hummingbird. She felt overwhelmed, dizzy, and wished she could somehow stop the random associations bubbling up.

  “It tastes happy,” Hyrum said, biting and grinding the hard candy on his back molars, and swallowing the shards. “Cucamonga! When can I get more shots?”

  They continued strolling through the food court. Chicken nuggets, burritos, sushi—all unknown foods to them. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Jamba Juice ad infinitum—they might as well have been brightly colored Buddhist temples to these kids.

  “What part of the chicken is the nugget?” Deuce asked.

  “The balls,” Hyrum guessed.