Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Rowan’s reticence sought eagerness on their part. Childish challenge, pity, nosiness, anything that it could push against, and found nothing.

  Her shoulders slumped, a great sigh whistling out of her. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said.

  Again, the kids said nothing, as if sensing that a single word might break the spell. Rowan examined each of their faces separately, and then quietly began to speak.

  “Sometimes, the police want excuses to look into someone’s business. And if you give them an excuse, they start coming around even when you don’t invite them. Sometimes, it can lead to more trouble than the original problem.”

  “More problem than broken ribs?”

  Rowan’s lips opened in the slightest of weary smiles. “You didn’t say that that was part of your story. But yes, some things are worse than broken ribs.”

  That was as much as Rowan was going to say. She stood. Pork was right behind her. “We’ll handle this,” Ralph said. “I’ve handled things before.”

  “That was twenty years ago,” Rowan said gently. “Closer to thirty.”

  “I still know how to protect my own,” he said. Her thin arm slipped around his waist. Patrick had studied the Vietnam era in school, and found himself wondering how an ex-hippie and a ’Nam vet had ended up together. They’d created two sons, wrestler and karate-fighter, but both known to be pussycats. How had this odd family settled in a nowhere town like Claremont, brewing espresso, selling books and running a discreet pot farm somewhere up in the hills? You never knew.

  Maybe Ralph read his mind, or something close to it. The big man turned, stared studiedly out of the front window in a rather absurd attempt at nonchalance. “You live over in the trailer park, don’t you, Pat? Over near Cappy’s bunch?”

  Rowan gave her husband a dirty look. He shrugged. “Just a fucking question.” He winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Listen: forget about it.”

  White Rabbit wailed its conclusion. No new song filled the void, and the silence stretched on.

  Images and labels danced in Patrick’s mind: Cappy and his vile crew. The youngest member of a family of fighting hippies. A coffee shop with a reputation for pot.

  And what was Cappy’s reputation? Hadn’t there been whispers there, too? Hadn’t he seen one of Cappy’s crew, one of the motorcycle creeps, riding up behind the football field at the high school, seen some of the high school stoners going back to meet him?

  Know the Ways of all professions.

  Rowan and Ralph wouldn’t be partners with Cappy.

  What if they were competitors?

  “They know you won’t go to the cops?” Patrick ventured.

  Rowan’s eyes opened wide, and Ralph coughed, covering his mouth with one thick hand. She lit a cigarette with her nicotine-stained fingers. Patrick saw that her hands were shaking.

  At the absolute corner of his vision, Frankie inclined his head a fraction of an inch, nodding approval.

  He wasn’t sure what might have been said or done in the next moment, but suddenly Manny entered through the back of the shop. Manny looked like a big, healthy Kansas farm boy, his crimson hair a gift from his mother. Right now he had a painful limp, and favored his right side. He grinned ruefully. “Hey, Mom, Dad.” He noted Patrick and his friends staring at him. “Hey, little dudes. It looks worse than it is, you know.”

  His brother and a couple of his friends crowded in behind him. One of them was well over six feet, lantern-jawed, with knobby hands and veined arms. The other was small, with very quick, precise movements and long black hair. He had a crooked, thin-lipped, reckless grin. These three pretty much ran the Claremont Kung Fu Academy. Patrick felt a violent itchiness in the air, as if the three of them were waiting for some crazy, half-starved, taloned raptor to roost.

  Rowan and Ralph left the kids, and clustered around their sons and their friends, talking in low voices, occasional sharp bursts of forced jollity resulting in shallow laughter.

  Once, Ralph turned and looked back at them, expression quizzical. Then he took his sons back behind the counter into the kitchen.

  War talk, Patrick thought. Oh, shit. He thought about Cappy’s bunch, and contrasted them with Rowan’s family. He wanted to throw up.

  They sipped their cooling cocoa. Rowan put another CD on the player. Procol Harum began to sing about skipping the light fandango, whatever the hell that meant. Another minute passed, in which Rowan busied herself rearranging cinnamon rolls and finishing her cigarette.

  Then she stubbed the butt out, and went back into the kitchen. A minute later, Ralph came out, and waddled to the table. He stood looking down at them, his expression so odd he seemed almost to be a different man. He appeared distant, scared, defiant and completely walled in. He might have been standing atop a fortified hill, in fatigues and battle array, hands on an air-cooled .50 mm machine gun, gazing down on a horde of advancing Cong.

  “You kids,” he said softly. “You’re pretty darned smart. Don’t be too smart.” That was all he said, but all of that odd, compressed energy lay behind those ten words, and it made Patrick feel like he had brushed against a beehive.

  Crazy Frankie broke the silence. “What about rolling me a fat one? Whattaya think?”

  Ralph snorted. “Chocolate’s on the house.”

  Frankie made a face at Ralph’s back as he disappeared behind the kitchen’s double doors. Rowan reappeared a moment later, and busied herself at the cash register. She looked as if someone had drained three or four pints of her blood in the minutes since her sons had arrived.

  The message was clear: Drink your drinks and leave. This is family business.

  Destiny took another sip and stood. “Thanks, Rowan.” Rowan nodded without speaking, still not meeting their eyes. Frankie finished his next. He tried to smile, but Rowan wouldn’t meet his eyes. Finally they just backed out of the door and eased it closed gently, so that the bell didn’t even tinkle. Something terrible, and terribly sad, was happening back in that kitchen. They didn’t belong here.

  The sad thing was, neither did Rowan and her family, and Patrick would have bet his left eye that they understood that better than anyone.

  7

  Vivian was closing up the shop, securing the door’s double locks, and drawing the iron gate across the window. Business-wise, the day had been average, but there were … extras that quickened her step deliciously.

  She carried a double armful of fabric rolls out to the parking lot and fumbled a little, searching for her keys. As she popped up the trunk she paused, listening to the drifting sounds of merriment from the Beefhouse across the street. It was still early in the evening. Things would get raucous around 10 o’clock, when the restaurant would shut down, the bar customers romping and stomping to the Nashville beat. Even if she rarely indulged in that particular brand of merriment, she could still envy them.

  Or would have envied them, under ordinary circumstances, on other days. Today, her heart was lighter than it had been in weeks.

  Her battered black station wagon was twenty years old but still mobile. Sliding past the door, she grimaced as the rough, torn seat cloth scraped the backs of her thighs. The blanket seat-cover had ridden up a bit, exposing threads worn almost down to the springs. A tug at her stockings reminded her how very close to the edge she played.

  It took three twists of the key before the engine turned over. Then she switched on the lights, illuminating more of the parking lot than she really wanted to see. During the day, the area looked downright respectable. Customers from the other shops filled the lot, and their noise and traffic helped to sustain the illusion of a bustling enterprise. At night, light from the street lamps seemed to flatten everything out, leached the vitality out of the buildings, made the entire area seem more than ever just another slum in desperate need of gentrification.

  She pulled out of the lot and down a darkened street behind a new shopping center. Vivian had held her breath as the megaplex went up: There wa
s always the chance that someone would open a costume shop there, and in fact she had considered bidding on a space herself, merely to reduce the probability of another costume shop moving into her territory. For a while a party-goods store had opened, but the clientele was so different that she was able to relax: no competition there, nothing that might pare a few vital dollars from her income, funds she could ill afford to lose. Fortunately the megaplex was mostly outlet stores, and pulled most of its customer base from traffic on the I-5.

  The Claremont trailer park was a ten-minute drive from the shop, mostly twisty turns on narrow streets, finally crossing a bridge across the Cowlitz River, along River View, and finally to the place she called home. She checked the mailbox as she turned in the drive, pulled out a handful of bills and glossy ads for magazines she would never read, envelopes from banks begging her to take their credit cards. Nothing personal, nothing particularly interesting. She navigated the narrow streets, past the L where two trailers sat almost kissing, a familiar clutch of Harley-Davidson and Suzuki motorcycles parked out in front. Those trailers: one yellow with an emerald roof, the other an eyesore in primer gray, seemed to host an eternal party. A rotating clutch of rowdy men and shrill, gaudy women drank and laughed until three in the morning most weekends. Complaining brought out the cops—eventually. But it usually brought out the same cop, a beefy, sandy-haired borderline thug named Krup who was brother to Cappy’s girlfriend. If Krup came out things usually quieted down, but on two occasions the complainants had met with mysterious accidents. Slipping on black ice. Falling down stairs. People stopped calling the police.

  Past that trailer and a small forest of laundry trees was the southern fence. Through the fence, Vivian could see the worn and empty husk of Claremont Daycare. Its boarded-up windows still accused her. She hunched at the wheel and focused forward. The pain and guilt were no longer so overpowering, but she didn’t like seeing the place. She wished someone would raze it to the ground, or at the very least rent and redecorate it. Failing that, she might have to move one day, just so that she wouldn’t have to look at it every damned day of her life.

  She might have moved already, but there was no other park north of Claremont, and moving to the south end of town, down by the mill, would be almost like moving over to Allantown. It would also mean separating Patrick from his friends, and she couldn’t do that, not merely to salve her own conscience.

  Vivian pulled up in front of her double-wide Monticello, approving of the way the little white Christmas lights shone through the trellised ivy. They twinkled slowly enough that one rarely noticed that the patterns rotated a hundred and eighty degrees every thirty seconds, lending a celestial effect to the walkway. It was just one of a hundred different ways that she strove to create a touch of magic in her life.

  Vivian slid open the glass door, and sighed at the sight of the divine mess spread around the floor. The sigh wasn’t one of regret or irritation, it was pure pleasure. Where other eyes might see a mere scrap heap of old clothes and tatters, hers saw nothing but possibilities, a thousand different ways that this and that scrap might couple, incubate, and birth a costume. This was home.

  “Patrick?” she called.

  From the back came a muffled “Here, Mom.”

  She went down the narrow hallway to the converted bedroom that served as a den. Patrick, Destiny and Frankie Darling were sprawled in front of the television, meditating on the Disney channel. It was all perfectly innocent, but Vivian felt a bit uneasy that Destiny’s mother seemed so unconcerned that her thirteen-year-old daughter hung out, unsupervised, with boys. Or that Frankie’s father, the Reverend Doctor himself, rarely seemed to know or care where his son was.

  Frankie was the first of them to turn around. “Hi, Mrs. Emory,” he said, with something in his voice that reminded her of that character in old Leave It to Beaver reruns, Eddie Haskell. Good morning, Mrs. Cleaver, how lovely you look today …

  Patrick waved at her without taking his eyes from the adventures of Aladdin.

  “Patrick—did you take the chicken out of the freezer?”

  He nodded without turning around. “Yes, Mom.”

  Hmmm. She wasn’t entirely sure why she even bothered asking. “Destiny, Frankie: you’re both welcome to stay for dinner if you would like.”

  Vivian went out into the living room, so crowded with cloth and thread and equipment that it had become an unabashed sewing center. Her home computer, a Dell Dimension, sat watchfully on a cloth-draped dresser table. A tap of its scroll bar and the screen flashed to life.

  She snuggled back into a plush-backed chair, and took another look through her mail. Nothing imperative or important magically appeared.

  She turned on the computer, and signed onto AOL. The familiar “You’ve got mail” voice greeted her, and she clicked on incoming mail to find the name RSAND.

  Allowing herself the tiniest of smiles, she clicked on the message again. “Dear Mrs. Emory—”

  She read it twice over, then stared at the screen for a full two minutes before tapping out her reply:

  “Of course I remember you. You were kind to me during that terrible trial, and you kept your word in ways that some of the other reporters didn’t. We all appreciate…”

  She backed up and reconsidered. All of them? What “all,” exactly?

  “I appreciate that. The next time you are through town, why not drop by the shop and say hello? Patrick and I would enjoy seeing you.”

  She stopped, fingers floating above the keyboard, debating whether to say more, and then added:

  “This has been a stressful time due to a recent separation, with the seeming inevitability of a divorce.”

  Blushing at her own boldness she continued: “A friendly face would seem nice right now.”

  That was almost too much. She had never said anything that brash in her entire life. But she did remember him, and more important, remembered her own reaction to him. What would he think? Would he find her desperate? Lonely? Or just honest?

  Her finger hovered over the “delete” key, then she clicked “send.”

  There was a short beeping interlude as electrons reshuffled, sending her message irretrievably out across the internet. The blush she had felt since first opening his e-mail that afternoon was beginning to spread, becoming a more generalized tingle. And that tingle became almost disturbingly localized, a sensation that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in months. Maybe longer.

  “Girl,” she whispered happily, “you aren’t dead yet.”

  8

  THURSDAY, MAY 10

  Eighty miles northwest of Phoenix, Arizona, is the town of Prescott, bordered by cattle land to the south and east. Further to the northeast rise densely wooded hills, the Prescott National Forest, some of the most beautiful country in the entire state. Rising up above the high desert, this land is watered by the not-infrequent rains, and densely wooded with spruce, firs and ponderosa pines.

  There are hundreds of campgrounds, public and private, including many set aside specifically for large group activities. Children come from around the country to camps run by the YMCA, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and any other group that decides it would be a good idea to get a gaggle of kids or adults out of the city and a little closer to God and nature for a few days.

  One of those camps is located in a box canyon, with steeply wooded hills on either side. There is one winding road in, down off the 89A between Mingus Mountain and the Potato Patch, through a branching warren of increasingly rough trails that would test the suspension of a tank, not to mention the Ford Bronco currently bumping along its knotted passages.

  The driver was almost invisible behind the tinted windshield, and drove at a steady, almost prissily slow pace, like an elderly woman trying to navigate a road full of cats. The trail widened after a narrowing phase, and the driver pulled past a sign marked CHARISMA LAKE CAMPING GROUND, into a turn-out, and parked.

  He eased himself out of the car with a rare fluidity of motion. The drive
r was a black man in his early fifties. His hair was almost shockingly white, but his face was relatively unlined, very rectangular. His arms were quite long, his hands a carpenter’s or laborer’s hands, strong with square-tipped fingers and scarred knuckles.

  The driver was met almost immediately by a wide-faced, hearty man in his sixties in a red and black checkered shirt and blue jeans. His waist spread a bit, but his shoulders were so wide one barely noticed. He introduced himself as Del Withers. The driver said he was Mr. Park, and they shook hands. Park and Withers talked, and walked, roaming around the camp area.

  There were twelve weathered log cabins, divided into clusters of four: one near the activity center, one near the dining hall, one near the baseball diamond and soccer field. Withers showed the younger man everything.

  Park seemed intensely interested, asking many questions, listening patiently to the answers.

  After another hour, they climbed the northern rise up to the lake itself. It was clear that the water level was unusually low, the rings of dried muddy residue suggesting that this year had been particularly dry. The same impression would be gained from studying the bushes and trees, the brown needles, the too-crisp leaves.

  “We have a hundred and fifty acres here, Mr. Park. Our own wells, too … although we’ve had a very low rainfall this year.”

  Park nodded. “I noticed.”

  “Hope that won’t cause a problem,” Withers said, and then continued too quickly for his own taste. “Kids still love to get in the water, even if it’s a little thick.” He paused. “This is the only spot where a cell phone will work, by the way.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, also on top of those ridges east and west, and down south a mile or so.”

  “I guess I’d heard that.”

  There was a long pause. The younger man hadn’t said anything, was just gazing ruminatively at the blue-green, placid surface of the lake. Then he turned and looked back south. From here, the entire camp and athletic field looked more than ever like a model set in the hollow of a saddle, the hills to either side rising up like short horns. The grade dropped away steadily for over a mile. Field, cabins, activity buildings, mess hall—all were spaced out along the shallow decline. The entire camp was framed by the brown, dry brush to the east and west. South, below the camp, the grass looked a bit brittle and brown, as if it hadn’t seen a good rain in months. Still, there was a sense of peace, a natural beauty to the layout, as if its original architects had struggled to preserve the natural aesthetics.