Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Her classmates had had more visceral and personal reactions to the lectures. Already, the most persuasive boys and the ripest girls clung to each other in dark after-school hallways, in latchkey homes, in the echoey, damp spaces beneath the stadium steps. She understood what happened there, knew who played what games with whom, watched as children became ensnared in the ancient game of man and woman. Which was predator? Which prey? She wasn’t sure, knew only that the entire issue had teeth, could bite and trap and tear. Tanesha felt a deep and not entirely explicable uneasiness when the matter came to mind.

  The plaintive sound of a popular girl group’s hit song drifted out of the doorway of a little beauty salon. Ironic, she thought to herself. (Irony was a new concept for Tanesha, one she had acquired from a critical analysis of O. Henry’s short stories.) She applied the concept not to the song’s crazy-cool lyrics, which warned of the dangers of AIDS (she actually found the lyrics naively rhymed and puerile, another new word), but rather to the fact that one of the three singers had subsequently tested positive for HIV.

  Musician, heal thyself, she thought. She brayed laughter, then frowned, momentarily saddened by the realization that there was no one, absolutely no one at all down here in L.A., who would groove to that particularly nasty piece of humor. Once, she had had friends who would understand, especially Patrick, who had given Tanesha her first, and still sweetest, kisses. But those kisses, and her friends, were now many months gone, and a thousand miles north.

  As she zipped along her mind went to more serious thoughts connected with HIV. Without volition, a strain of music accompanied those thoughts, almost like a carrier tone. The music playing in her mind wasn’t the moderately harmonious sound of the girl group. Nor was it Marvin Gaye. Rather, it was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, the version played by Stephen Bishop Kovacevich. Its subtleties were a deep and calming river. Her thoughts on HIV drifted in its currents, melding and fluxing in melodic geometries. It often resulted in strangely, illogically juxtaposed combinations. Sometimes the results were startling and apparently original: her art teacher told her she resolved perspectives as if they were algebraic equations. Her math teacher told her her proofs didn’t work, but she produced the right answers anyway. Weird. She didn’t understand why other people didn’t see and hear the patterns that had coursed through her veins for as long as she could remember.

  Simple, really: certain strains of serious thought spontaneously triggered one of perhaps three dozen pieces of classical music, ranging from the current Mozart to Handel’s largo from Xerxes to Vivaldi’s allegro from The Fall.

  Let’s see … she might cross-reference medical and cultural views of the various factors involved in the spread of the disease. Boys gave it to girls, and boys gave it to boys, and dopers passed it around on their needles. That pattern felt right. But regardless of what was taught in health class, girls didn’t seem to give it to boys hardly at all. No matter what the doctors said, they never had the actual numbers to back it up, and the crystalline symbolic structure in her mind refused to come into focus.…

  Her thoughts drifted, intense but tranquil, gripping at her with sinewy arms, drawing her into a world of pure speculation, most of her mind seeking pattern and counter-pattern while a small, barely conscious portion concerned itself with the tricky business of navigation. That small part guided as she bumped down from the curb, planning to roll up on the sidewalk right into the shoe-repair store. The rest of her broke free to full awareness barely in time to hear old Mrs. Johnson’s warning screams.

  Finally, too late, she looked up in time to see the metal-gray juggernaut of a Chrysler bearing down on her.

  Oh God! It’s Jesse…! she thought, then registered that there were two people in the front seat. A black man with short white hair, too thick of face to be Jesse, drove. A Caucasian in his early fifties hunched in the passenger seat beside him. She had time to register their drawn mouths and dead eyes. There was no surprise in either face. And no anger. Perhaps … regret.

  She had time to think: They’re not even trying to stop—

  Tanesha experienced the impact more as light than pain. Then flying, a negation of gravity. Dimes, quarters and crumpled bills exploded from her pockets in a spray. A second impact as her neck thudded against the window of a parked Volkswagen Jetta.

  Darkness.

  Dancing speckles of dim light. She heard change jangle to the ground, coins spinning like little silver tops.

  Final moments: splayed broken on the ground, deaf to the growing screams around her, ears filled with the sound of her own wet and tortured breathing. Things were shattered and torn inside her, and her arms and legs wouldn’t respond to her mind’s commands. Oddly, she could feel but not hear her killers’ Chrysler as it accelerated away.

  She couldn’t feel herself breathe. Couldn’t move her neck. Distantly, she heard the Aerostar’s front wheel rotate. Fast at first, and then winding down, grinding slow. She knew by the sound that the wheel was bent. She hoped that stepfather Floyd would be able to straighten it out.

  Tanesha felt no pain. Absurdly, blessedly, the sound of Kovacevich’s dancing fingers still floated through her mind.

  It’s not so bad, she thought. Not nearly as bad as people always seemed to fear. She wished she could tell her mother. Mommy was always so afraid of everything. Tanesha was sorry about the bike. She wanted to apologize to Floyd for spoiling it.

  The music grew softer, blended with the breeze, devolving into an inaudible murmur. With a final shush, the Aerostar’s wheel stopped.

  Moments afterward, so did Tanesha’s fluttering heart.

  1

  SATURDAY, MAY 5

  Renny Sand drove south along I-5 from Vancouver, British Columbia to Vancouver, Washington, taking a little side trip to Claremont. His intention was to visit the town where his conscience had last been sighted, lurching through the foggy northwest landscape like Bigfoot.

  The trip takes about eight hours, a straight shot down the Five, an emerald explosion of evergreens and brush and lush grasses. He’d driven four hours, stopped off in a tiny single-offramp hamlet in the middle of a thousand rolling acres of farm land, and found a motel next to a right-wing Uncle Sam billboard blasting left-wing politics in general and dose ol’ debbo liberal Democrats in particular.

  He woke at six the next morning and hit the freeway again, grabbing coffee and a breakfast bagel sandwich from one of the countless espresso stands sprouting like toadstools in the Washington rain. The radio blared enough country music to make him want to Uzi a line dance.

  Renny’s stomach felt raw and tight and sour. He punched the buttons on his rental Saab’s radio, looking for something to listen to that didn’t make him feel like a long-haul trucker or a holy roller, and finally settled on a sports station. Forty minutes of talk-show chatter about the Seahawks’ latest draft acquisition dissolved in a sea of static. A few more twists of the dial found some pre-programmed top forty presented by a cloned disk jockey, resulting in twenty miles of rap, grunge, and annoying teenybop. Finally, he gave up and turned the damned thing off.

  The last trip along this interstate had been six years earlier, in February of ’95. He was just another one of a dozen big-town reporters descending on the town of Claremont, a lumber town of twenty thousand set thirty minutes north of Portland. There they sat, in a poorly ventilated courtroom watching a parade of children testifying in the most infamous day-care scandal since McMartin.

  Live testimony, deposition, videotape … one piece after another in a bizarre and heartbreaking jigsaw puzzle assembled painstakingly for judge and jury.

  He recalled his first impression of the courtroom: bad lighting, cold air, packed house. There was one empty seat, next to a big red-faced farm girl with a phenomenal chest and crystal-blue eyes almost intense enough to pull attention from the trial.

  The kid talking on video was a little straw-haired boy named Darnell Whittaker. Darnell looked clean, neat and frightened, about eleve
n years old, with rings under his eyes that suggested that he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in months.

  “And do you remember any of the other games they played with you?” asked the unseen inquisitor.

  Darnell’s eyes darted around like an animal seeking escape from a trap. “Bad games,” his video image replied in a low, shaky voice. “Naked lady games.”

  That was all he would say. Darnell hadn’t looked at the questioner again. The tape ended, and the monitor was rolled out of the room. The first of the live witnesses took the stand. This child was black, a remarkable kid named Tanesha Evans. At only eight years old, she had true star presence, reminded Renny of that spooky-smart little girl on the old Cosby show. Tanesha’s skin and eyes fairly radiated health. The courtroom couldn’t pry its collective eyes from the girl, from the moment she walked through the door until she laid her left hand on the Bible and raised her right.

  The D.A. was a middle-aged Seattleite named Betty Ann Welles. Betty affected a rather grandmotherly air today, but once upon a time Renny had watched her grind a crack dealer into splinters, her Miss Marple demeanor transformed into a damned fine impression of Jaws. “Tanesha?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “When did you begin to have the nightmares?”

  Tanesha paused only a moment before speaking. “About a year ago. Maybe longer, but that was when I first began to remember them.”

  Pretty impressive phrasing for a girl her age. Renny looked around the courtroom, wondering where her parents were. There were several candidates, the most promising being a heavy woman with black and Asian features in a floral muumuu. She sat on the far side of the courtroom and leaned forward slightly, hanging on Tanesha’s words, lips curled tightly with satisfaction and encouragement.

  “And can you tell us what these dreams were about?”

  Normally you would have expected Tanesha to hesitate for a minute, as if she were a child of a younger, perhaps more innocent time. But then Renny often felt trapped in a generation gap, suspended halfway between Aretha Franklin and Lil’ Kim.

  Not exactly progress.

  “Sex,” Tanesha said positively. “Bad sex. Hurting women.” She had looked out at the courtroom, not down at her shoes. She wasn’t ashamed. She was just telling Betty Ann Welles what the D.A. needed to hear. For some reason, the sight of this brave little girl, her face so dark and clean, her eyes so filled with intelligence, filled him with both shame and a fluid, corrosive anger.

  “Were there children in the dream?”

  Tanesha had shaken her head. “No.” She paused. “Well, I was there.”

  “You were there. And was anyone else in the courtroom there?”

  She hesitated, and then pointed. “Mrs. Coffee was there. She was the woman.” And she pointed to the owner of the preschool, a small, pale, frightened woman who looked as if she had not the faintest idea why and how her world had suddenly imploded on her.

  Bad sex. What in hell had Tanesha meant by that?

  * * *

  Renny Sand took the first Claremont exit, turning off onto Allan Street. The freeway had dumped him into Allantown, a tiny low-rent burg connected to Claremont by proximity and a two-lane bridge. Heading west, he passed through a town straining to be cosmopolitan (huge electronic sign above the Claremont Mall announcing a carnival, posters proclaiming the near-future erection of a new bridge) but reminding Renny of a fifties-era midwestern town: mom-and-pop bakeries, corner shoe-repair shops, feed stores, horse-tackle emporiums complete with hitching posts.

  Across a narrow bridge was Claremont proper. Claremont and Allantown were both settled by mill workers, but Claremont budded off from the older, poorer town. That’s where the executives and business owners lived, and where the tax money went. He couldn’t drive a block without noticing that Claremont’s streets were in better repair. There were fewer boarded-up windows, fewer taverns, more smiling faces. Money makes a difference.

  There weren’t too many cars on the street, but he did notice one kid on a bike. White kid, pasty-pale, maybe twelve, he wore a pea-green jacket with that Army-Navy look, and had dark short-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He glided along like a ghost, not seeming to pay any attention to the traffic. When it was time to turn left on River Front Drive, Renny stopped for him. Without looking at the reporter, the boy paused as well. Neither of them moved for a good five seconds, and then the kid turned and stared at Renny incuriously, waving him on.

  River Front parallels the Cowlitz river, and Renny marked three miles of winding road, past happy signs for neighborhood auto repair and used appliance dealers, to the site of the Claremont Daycare.

  The faded blue building sat a Frisbee-throw from the river. It was empty now, but walking its overgrown periphery, he could easily imagine the excited babble of children’s voices. Claremont Daycare had been abandoned for six years now. The building was still empty; a weatherbeaten real estate sign erected in the front yard suggested that no one had made serious efforts to sell it in a very long time. Its walls were stenciled with faded bootleg silhouettes of Daffy and Bugs and Luke Skywalker. It was almost impossible to believe that anything more scandalous than a little copyright infringement had ever occurred in the vicinity.

  But according to duly noted testimony, between January and September of ’93, something had indeed occurred, something which gave the forty children entrusted to Claremont Daycare grotesque and recurrent nightmares of sexual abuse, intercourse, violence, death, and torture.

  A chain-link fence separated the school from a trailer park to the north. On the far side, a pale, fleshy woman was hanging laundry, pretending not to watch him. Curiosity is a two-edged sword. Renny approached her smiling his friendliest smile and walking his very best newsman walk, the one that said he was the eyes and ears and conscience of the people.

  The clouds were high and bright, the sun shining with that almost unnatural clarity sometimes found in the northwest, rendering shadows so sharp and black they seemed painted on the ground.

  “I’m Renny Sand,” he said. “Marcus News Services. I was here six years back, covering the trial.” Even after all this time, he didn’t have to say which trial.

  She nodded without speaking, continuing her labors, pinning another sheet up on the line. Her eyes were very bright violet, the color of a morning glory petal. They were almost childlike in their directness. There seemed a penetrating bafflement about her, as if she awakened every morning, wondering exactly how an eleven-year-old’s heart had become trapped within such a tired and doughy prison.

  “You were here at the time?”

  “Nowhere else,” she said.

  “Must have gotten pretty sick of it all. The same questions, over and over again.”

  She turned, her colorless lips studiedly neutral. “You got that right.”

  “Tell me … of all the stuff you’ve read in the papers, all the things said on television, all the things that people asked you, whether or not you think they listened to the answers—what is the one thing that you wish someone had asked you? The one thing that no one ever thought to say?”

  Now she stopped. Her small bright eyes glittered at Sand as if she wondered if perhaps he wasn’t quite as dim as the others. She lowered her gaze, hiding her reactions. Without meeting his eyes, she pinned a blue and red striped sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves onto the line, and then turned back.

  “School was good to those kids,” she said. “I don’t know what might have happened later, but everybody forgets that they was problem kids.”

  “All of them?”

  She nodded. “If somebody in the neighborhood got into a fight, you could bet it was with one of those kids.” She met his gaze then, defiantly, as if daring him to try to contradict her. “Child-care folks seemed to go out of their way to find troublemakers. Bad families.” She paused, her little blue eyes searching for the right words. “Mister, I don’t mean this wrong, but they was trash. All of them—even that little Emory scamp, still lives ri
ght here in this park.”

  “So … the family still lives here?” He pretended to search his memory. “Vivian and Otis and little Patrick?”

  “Her old man moved out, but she and the kid are still there.”

  Something like electricity ran along his spine, a sensation that made a mockery of his pretended calm.

  “Anyway,” she continued blithely, “I don’t believe what people said about that school. Maybe they were just scaring Jesus into them.”

  “So you’re glad they got off? Not everyone is.”

  Her lips twisted from neutrality into her very finest look-at-the-idiot-big-town-reporter sneer. “Maybe you call it ‘getting off.’ Look at that dump.”

  The challenge in her gaze had him hammerlocked, and Renny looked back at the shell of the old preschool. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but the abandoned building seemed even shabbier, somehow hollow and husked. More than shelves and furnishings were gone: its soul was dead.

  “That case ruined the Coffees. They lost their houses, the school, pumped out their credit cards, and probably had their wages garnished for the next million years. Old lady Coffee’s health went bust. I hear she died last year. Broken heart, most likely. Losing the school, that no-account son of hers…”

  “Her son?”

  The laundress made a bitter coughing sound, but didn’t answer the implied question. “‘Getting off.’ Look, mister. I don’t know much, but I know that those kids were brats when they started, and after a few months they weren’t trouble no more.”

  Shrugging, she turned back to her laundry. There was something so sad about her, so heavy and tired, that he felt almost guilty for asking her to resurrect her painful memories. Feeling somewhat depressed, Renny returned to his rented car and headed back to the freeway.