Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Vivian had intimate knowledge of every secondhand shop within fifty miles. She ranged from Woodland to Battleground on her bicycle when the weather was good, begging rides from parents or friends on rainy days. She found every yard sale, Goodwill store and fabric overstock sale in the entire area. She could look at a scrap of nothing, destined for the trash heap, and see within it the seed of a formal gown, peacock-feather hat or shaggy-dog costume. She simply had the knack, developed back when she would costume and clothe and re-clothe her Barbies in endlessly varied raiment.

  The skills served her well. With material costs minimal, the only limitations were her skill, ambition and energy, and those were boundless. Soon, the Weatherlys, who had operated their little costume rental shop mostly selling Halloween items and New Year’s party favors, who stocked helium gas and novelty hats and Mylar balloons intended for the odd office shebang, discovered that little Vivian’s custom costume sideline was their most popular and profitable service.

  When she graduated high school, they gave her a little apartment above their shop, paid for her B.A. degree in Theater Arts at Portland State, and provided opportunity after opportunity to invest in the store, with the hope that Vivian would eventually buy them out.

  At the age of eighteen she had married her high school sweetheart, the solid and dependable (if occasionally uninspiring) Otis Emory, and labored to keep their life together, to create a happy family of three. They knew that the store would eventually pay off, and two years later she did buy the Weatherlys out, with a combination of cash and a percentage of net over the next five years.

  And so at twenty, when most of her friends were happy with jobs at the mill or in secretarial or food service positions in the surrounding small towns, Vivian Emory owned her own business.

  In those early days, in a good week she worked only sixty hours.

  Sometimes, though, she wondered. Occasionally she caught a mirrored glimpse of the slender, caramel-skinned woman with the dark, straight hair, and wondered at the choices she had made. But a choice, once made, creates its own path. She had learned that from Patrick. It was something that his hero, Alexander Marcus, had said a thousand times.

  Vivian had Patrick, and her husband, and her work. By sheer force of will she turned herself into the kind of woman who could decide to be content, and usually was. She could make the choice. Create the path.

  This was her dream. And if there was anything wrong with having a dream, it was the fear that one day it might turn into a nightmare. She didn’t call her own private fear a nightmare, exactly. To Vivian, it was the darkness beyond the dream, something amorphous, like a cloud of squid ink floating in murky water. Something that wasn’t alive, wasn’t conscious, but had a sense of direction. Perhaps it was something primordial and shapeless that sought heat and nourishment. In her heart of hearts, she dreaded that if she aspired to too much or held her head too high the darkness might find her.

  And if she occasionally, too often perhaps, thought back to the events six years previous, when the men in the dark suits had asked her so many questions, when they had taken her son for questioning, when the darkness had awakened, fumbled blindly toward her and her family …

  If there was order in the universe, any future disaster might well be attracted by her own secret shame, fear that she had once made a terrible, unforgivable mistake, that she should somehow have known that Claremont Daycare would prove a disastrous choice.

  * * *

  Customers came and went, one picking up an altered dress, another selecting a few pieces of costume jewelry for layaway. After the last sale Vivian closed the register and sat back on her stool, sighing. There were so many choices to make. Each closed another door, pared away another option in a life that already felt too damned constrained.

  Power ran into Vivian’s shop computer, a strawberry iMac, at all times, but its screen darkened when not in use. She touched the spacebar, and the CRT glowed to life.

  A couple of clicks put her on-line. She had no dedicated phone line, but her modem program dialed *70 when she went on, so that she wouldn’t get booted off by an incoming call.

  The familiar series of AOL screens passed, irritating ads (no, she wasn’t interested in a computerized gardening blueprint), and then the welcoming “You’ve got mail!” voice, followed by the sight of the little box with a yellow envelope protruding from its door.

  Double-clicking, she took a quick look at a list of messages. Setting up the web page had been a lark. She hadn’t anticipated much of a benefit, but America Online offered free web space, so she’d gone for it. Within six months she had received orders totaling over eight thousand dollars. At that point she realized that she’d better take cyberspace more seriously, moved her web page to Earthlink, and slowly began to put her stock on-line. Now there was hardly a day that an order from New York or Arkansas or Florida didn’t fatten her till.

  Patrick and his friends had made this possible. She didn’t know how or where they came up with all their moneymaking schemes, but was certainly grateful for their help.

  She clicked through the messages, looking at them one at a time, deleting the advertisements for porn or gambling, saving the business notes, and crafting swift replies for the few personal ones.

  Then she came to one that surprised her. The e-mail address was RSAND@Marcusl.com. Something at the very back of her head felt a little warm and dizzy when she saw that. She clicked it, watching the screen with narrowed eyes.

  It read:

  Dear Mrs. Emory. What a pleasure to stumble across your web page, and see that you and your family are doing well. You may not remember me. My name is Renny Sand, and I introduced myself at the courthouse six years ago. I was driving from Vancouver B.C. to Portland today, passed through Claremont, and thought of you. Hoping that this note finds you all in the very best of health, and that your boy is thriving.

  Best wishes, Renny Sand.

  Vivian stared at the screen for a long time. She certainly did remember the tall, handsome reporter, and in fact had gone out of her way to look up some of his news stories. He was good, wrote simply and to the point, with a touch of poetry to balance what she guessed to be a deep and protective vein of cynicism. Most important, Renny Sand had kept his word and never written about Claremont Preschool.

  The real question was: Why in the world did his promise matter? Why had she really looked up those stories? Why had she remembered him so quickly after six years, and why did she feel more than a little light-headed?

  If she was honest with herself (and she always tried to be) she knew that the answer had to do with the way he smiled, the fact that he had conveyed a little light into her life on a day when trouble seemed to have swallowed the sun.

  Perhaps it also had something to do with the choice that she had already made, the choice to divorce Otis, the fact that this man, the only man in ten years that she had responded to at all, had touched her life again. This was more than merely fortune. It seemed like an omen.

  The e-mail jolted her like two cups of double-shot espresso. Vivian saved the letter and signed off. Then she stretched her arms, enjoying the good feeling of under and over-used muscles responding to the torsion, and began to devise her answer.

  6

  Patrick and Destiny were making good time on their bikes, tooling east along Ocean Way, Claremont’s main drag. They passed out flyers to passersby, stuffed them under the windshield wipers of parked cars. A typical flyer read: “Bring a Friend! 50% off the second costume at Costumes, Period.” It then continued with a glowing list of Vivian Emory’s products and services.

  Weeks before, Patrick had said, “Hey, Mom, if you don’t blow your horn, who will?” Vivian shook her head in bashful exasperation, and conceded defeat.

  Patrick and Destiny competed to see who could cover his side of the street fastest, laughing and enjoying the game no matter who won.

  In the hills above Ocean Way, perched too high for the mill’s endless clouds of blue smok
e to trouble them, lived Claremont’s wealthiest citizens. Without exception, the roads leading up to these expansive, landed homes were steep and curvy, but the worst of them was Angel Avenue. Its incline was almost impassable in icy weather, and its western drop-off claimed a car every eighteen months or so. Depending on the severity of the wounds and the social standing of the victim, there generally followed a brief series of editorials and public-access cable speeches, as a concerned citizen or city father debated the closing of so-called Suicide Hill.

  The hilltop gentry invariably beat any such proposal down: their sports cars and jeeps had no trouble with the turns. Their moneyed children didn’t lose limbs or lives. And the furor died down, for another eighteen months or so.

  Generations of teenagers had made (and broken) their bones racing skateboards and bicycles top to bottom on Suicide Hill. It was socially disapproved, technically illegal and hazardous as hell, but adolescent ego is an insanely powerful evolutionary force. It was a rare day when some teen bravo didn’t weave his way down, screaming or hunched grimly over his handlebars, waiting until the very last second before applying brakes and sizzling off to the left, toward the comparative safety of Ronny Falco’s Mobil station.

  Waiting a half-second too long meant sliding straight out into traffic and a grisly, glorious death as a Plymouth hood ornament. Or spill right and plunge over the side, a nasty drop to the concrete apron of Claremont reservoir. For this reason, most Suicide Hill challengers waited until the early-morning hours, when traffic was lighter, and the margin of fatal error comfortably wide.

  But halfway through the distribution of Vivian Emory’s flyers, a bright red ten-speed zipped down Angel Avenue, brakes screaming, turned left through the gas station, and almost collided with Patrick.

  Patrick wrenched his bike to the side, grazed only by the maniacal laughter from the bespectacled kamikaze on the tenner. Patrick grimaced, trying to find a spot of anger, but the best he could work up was irritation. “Frankie! You could have killed me!”

  Frankie flashed his trademark banana-sized grin, chockablock with braces and Chiclet teeth. He wore a battered green navy coat that made him look twice his size. “Be a lot more fun than I’ve been having today. Whatcha up to?” He snatched a flyer, pushing his glasses back up on his nose to read it. “Oh, for your mom, huh? Can I help?”

  A little voice warned Patrick that this could be trouble, but Patrick rarely paid attention to that particular voice. He actually liked Frankie, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that trouble often seemed to follow him about. Frankie had an odd and interesting way of thinking. Never a dull moment. Still, Patrick hesitated. “Well, I don’t know…”

  Frankie clucked. His arms were all bone under his coat. In summer, his neck and back peeled in the sun. No matter how much time he spent outdoors, he never seemed to tan. “I know, this is all something for that club of yours.”

  “What club?” Patrick said blandly.

  Frankie’s smile was cold. “You know, the club you’ve never asked me to join. I don’t hate you for it. Maybe I should. Whattayathink?”

  That last was rhetorical, a mere Frankieism. Patrick knew better than to answer.

  Destiny waited for the cars to clear out of the street, and then scooted her bicycle across Angel Avenue, pedaling like hell. She hopped her bike up over the curb and came to an abrupt stop. “Hey, Frankie.”

  “Dez.” He acknowledged her with a nod. “Well, listen, I’m not trying to get into your stupid club. Just looking for something to do, and this looks like as much fun as anything.”

  Destiny and Patrick glanced at each other, and her mouth twisted into her “why not?” expression. Patrick’s shoulders hunched in acquiescence. Pat gave Frankie a fat pack of flyers.

  As Frankie thumbed them, he said, “Hey, did you hear what happened to Manny?”

  Patrick and Destiny exchanged another cautious expression. “Yeah,” Patrick said. “What did you hear?”

  “Four ribs. Says hit-and-run. I say it’s bullshit. What do you think?”

  Patrick felt a little trill of warning. “If not hit-and-run, then what?”

  “Got stomped. He was leaving a party over near the junior college, ran into the wrong guys, mouthed off. He won’t talk, but that’s what happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Keep an ear out, and you hear things.”

  Frankie was probably right. You could take an early-morning trip to the airport to pick up a cousin, and see Frankie pedaling his bicycle along the bridge. You could come back from a ten o’clock movie at the mall, midnight on a school night, and see Frankie pedaling that bicycle, face set in an expression of grim determination. Frankie’s parents never seemed to know where he was, and as long as he didn’t get into legal trouble, they hardly seemed to care. In his endless wanderings he had made an astonishing range of acquaintances, but Patrick doubted if he would call any of them friends.

  “Who hurt Manny?” Destiny asked.

  “Haven’t heard. Bet we could find out, though.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Patrick said. He glanced at Destiny. “We’re not supposed to go over to the Edge, though…”

  Frankie cut him dead. “Like that would stop you.” Nailed. Frankie wheedled his way toward the kill. “Come on…”

  “Well, if it’s business.”

  Frankie held up two fingers. “Just business. Scout’s honor.”

  “You were never a scout.”

  “Was too. Got kicked out for eatin’ Brownies.”

  Destiny gave a disgusted laugh, and the kids weaved down the street, enjoying the day. For a half hour they passed out leaflets up and down Pacific Coast, then turned south along Main Street, past the Sizzler restaurant and the Rialto theater (“Recently remodeled!”) and papered a parking lot next to a USBank. They went another block or so down, and were about to back off when Patrick saw Frankie staring at a blacked-out window below a sign reading The Saddle Shop. A lariat was painted around the edges of the sign. Jesus Loves You bumper stickers were pasted across the bottom of the window.

  Frankie arched an eyebrow at them. “Shall we?”

  Patrick felt disgust, amusement, fear, excitement … an odd mix of emotions that should have been competing, but weren’t. “No…”

  “Come on. Scared?”

  Yes. “N-no.”

  But he didn’t speak soon enough to keep Frankie from rocketing his bicycle across to the building. As they got closer, he heard the thump of iron on iron coming from behind the blacked-out glass. Metal sounds, and grunts of effort from men almost as hard.

  Frankie pulled his bike up and grabbed a few printed sheets from beneath the book clip. Destiny stared in disbelief, and Patrick was almost speechless with awe at Frankie’s daring. This was why he was willing to put up with the kid.

  Christ. Nobody, but nobody, went through that door.

  “Dare me?” Frankie said. At this point, no dare was necessary. Things had already progressed way beyond that.

  “They’ll eat your liver,” Patrick said.

  Frankie made a face at him, and turned to Destiny. “With fava beans and a nice kee-yanti? Dez. Dare me?”

  Her eyes blazed, but she tried to act noncommittal. “Go ahead, idiot, but don’t blame me.”

  Patrick motioned to Destiny to park her bike. He had only caught glimpses before this moment, and he was dying to see what the hell happened next. Maybe this would be the final chapter in the Crazy Frankie saga. If so, a witness was needed. He rolled his bike against the building, leaned it there and turned to Destiny. “Are you coming?”

  “Hell, no. And you won’t go if you’ve got the brains God gave a gerbil.”

  Frankie made a chipmunk face, pouching his cheeks and exposing his front teeth. “Then just wait here,” he said. “If you hear a scream, run for help.”

  “I’ll stroll,” Destiny replied.

  * * *

  Patrick was right behind Frankie as he pushed the door of the Saddle Shop open. Th
ere was no tinkle or beep, as might have been expected if the door was the entrance to a shop or bar.

  The room was dark and dank as a cave, just three overhead bulbs with circular shades casting fog-edged pools of yellow light on the floor. There was a bar to the left, but it was deserted at the moment. Later that evening, perhaps, it would be swamped. There were two billiard tables two-thirds of the way back, swallowed by shadows. A single bulky man with a shaven head practiced shots with almost mechanical precision. Chalked the cue, stroked, measured, chalked again.

  In the very back of the room, however, was its oddest feature. Three heavy-duty weight benches, handmade monsters of chrome, padded leather and dark heavy wood, were arrayed as much for display as utility. Weight benches that might have been hewn from redwoods by Paul Bunyan for his very special friend, the Jolly Green Giant.

  The six titans clustered at the benches fit the picture. Not one of them massed less than 220 pounds, with the largest nearing 300. Solid muscles, thick tendons, writhing snakelike ridges of flesh crisscrossing swollen chests. The air was a dense, tepid soup of testosterone and sweat.

  Their bodies were laced with tattoos that melded lightning bolt images with steel guitars. In cartooned configuration, men with impossibly proportioned and vascular physiques flexed and posed. One of the athletes was etched with a bodybuilder Christ on the cross. This Lamb looked strong enough to flatten Golgotha, stalk down from his perch and slaughter a regiment of Roman wolves. The wall posters continued the same disorienting themes: gleaming muscle men rather obviously posing for the pleasure of other muscle men.

  There was one man on each of the benches: two flat bench-press rigs and a leg-press device Torquemada would have swooned for. Apparently the victim was supposed to lie on his back and set his feet flat against seven or eight tons of iron plate loaded on the sled above. It looked like a surefire hernia generator.

  Each had a spotter watching carefully, encouraging efforts with voices that were disorienting melds of Marine drill sergeant and seductive coo.