The sound dynamic was excellent in the empty toilet, with the slightest harmonic reverb off the hard tiles and metal, so Pearl didn’t notice another girl come in to pee, and she didn’t stop singing when the door was opened, so she didn’t know her song had traveled far enough outside to where a boy named Josue heard the beautiful sound echoing through the hallway and, like Ulysses with the Sirens, did not think of the hard rocks that would probably await him if he, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, entered a girl’s bathroom. He strode down the hallway in a trance, led by the sound, opened the door, and walked in like he’d been doing that his entire life.
“Oh my god,” Josue asked of the stalls, “what is that?”
It took a few moments for Pearl to realize he was talking to her.
“Uh, what?”
“What’s that song you’re singing?”
“‘Long and Winding Road,’” Pearl answered matter-of-factly from behind the door.
“Did you write it?” he asked her feet, the only part of her he could see.
“No! What are you, stupid? It’s the Beatles.”
“Oh yeah, that’s like classical music.”
“You mean classic rock?”
“Who are you? You have the most amazing voice…”
And then the girl in another stall, who had been quietly going about her business, swung open her door and lost it on Josue.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now, kid?” she yelled at the boy. “You’re totally standing in the girl’s bathroom while I’m peeing!”
“Oh shit,” Josue said, suddenly realizing what he’d done and where he was, and flailing, almost falling down. “I … I … I … just heard her singing and I…”
Pearl walked out of her stall, exhaling Juul smoke. She didn’t know either of these idiots. The other girl was super upset. “I’m taking you to the principal,” she yelled at Josue, and then turning to Pearl said, “That’s safe-space invasion! This dude’s like a rapist, right? You’re a total witness!”
“He didn’t try to rape anyone.”
“I said, ‘like a rapist.’ Rape is a broad term.”
“Is it?” Pearl asked.
“Are you serious right now? He’s a space-rapist! Are you gonna back me or not, sister?”
Pearl shrugged. “Back you for what?”
“Oh my god, you’re such a bitch,” the girl whined, and shoved past Josue into the hallway, yelling for security.
Josue looked like he was about to throw up. Pearl shrugged at him, too. She had been perfecting her shrug the past few months.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Hosway,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Sure,” she said. They stared at each other. “How do you spell ‘Hosway’?”
“J-O-S-U-E. Jose with a ‘u’ in there.”
“You ever been in a girl’s bathroom before, Josue?”
“Never.”
“Whaddyou think?”
“Pretty nice.”
The girl was screaming out in the hallway. “Help! Security! Help! Pervert!” bounced around the bathroom slightly muffled.
“You have a great voice,” Josue said.
“You said that already.”
Ear cocked, Josue was half listening to the growing commotion outside.
“Maybe you should run,” Pearl said.
Josue considered that, then replied, “Probably too late.”
Pearl nodded. “Probably right.”
The door swung open again and a female teacher came barging into the bathroom with a security guard who grabbed Josue by the arm and hustled him out into the hallway.
“Dude, you’re hurting my arm, I’m not trying to go anywhere,” Josue complained to the guard.
“You are so fucked,” the other girl threatened.
“Are you all right, dear?” the teacher asked Pearl, putting an arm around her.
“I’m fine,” Pearl said, wriggling away from her grasp.
“I’m sorry, but we are gonna need a statement from you, dear.”
“You need a statement from me?”
“Yes.”
“High school sucks,” Pearl deadpanned.
“Oh, snap.” Josue laughed. “Legend.”
“Nothing the fuck happened,” Pearl added, displaying her quick acquisition of the rhythm of high school lingo, and started heading down the hallway the other way.
“Wait,” the teacher called out. “What’s your name?”
“Pearl,” she answered, not slowing.
“Pearl what?”
“Pearl De Jackie-san.”
“What?”
Pearl disappeared around the corner.
“That’s that new Mormon chick,” the other girl said.
15.
SUBTRACTING MARY, DEUCE, Pearl, and Hyrum from the hands available to work Agadda da Vida was a physical, as well as emotional, hardship. The family dynamic had shifted in ways that were unfathomable and changing daily, settling into new and strange configurations. Little Joe began to wet the bed. Palmyra wanted to learn how to speak French. Little Big Al was convinced his siblings had been taken away by “the cancer” that had killed one of his mothers, Jackie. Lovina Love had created an involved fantasy that her siblings were not coming back, that they had been abducted by aliens for horrible experimentation that seemed to always begin and end with the “butthole.” Yalulah chastised Bronson when he egged Lovina on to describe the anus-centered miseries that had befallen her siblings, but Bronson would keep on giggling like a schoolboy.
In September, Bronson and Yalulah planted the alfalfa alone for the first time. Though the “farm” area was less than twenty acres, without the teenagers, it seemed endless. They needed alfalfa, a good source of protein, for their livestock and for themselves. In mid-November, Bronson planted the durum wheat. Bronson had to irrigate and mulch by himself. When he brought along the younger kids to teach them about irrigation, how the threading of small hoses punctured at certain lengths to drip (and save) water worked and had to be maintained, they were often as much a hindrance as a help. He explained to the children why the farmed areas were lower than both the house and the well, and how he had chosen the sites carefully so that water used for baths and cleaning in the house would be reused with very little energy since it flowed downhill from the house to the soil beds as “gray” water to feed the crops. Explaining his hard-won engineering victories in this desert to the kids, he felt renewed in his quixotic mission, his love-hate battle with God’s elements, all over again. He hoped the kids fell in love with this life, too. He was not at all sure.
He showed them how he had repurposed old parachute material that he had squirreled away from stunt days, hanging it around a canopy made of light metal rods that kept the produce from burning up in the unrelenting desert sun, while still allowing enough light through for the plants to grow. This was one of his proudest innovations. Unfortunately, the younger kids were not suitably impressed, and were more interested to hear about the parachute material’s original function, defying gravity, floating down gently from the heavens, than its present-day, more prosaic use.
He would also plant the carrots in late winter, and harvest them with the kids come early spring; so, too, with the seasonal onions planted in mid-winter and picked in early summer. He would plant the okra and the potatoes. He tended the grapes, as well as plum and peach trees. He prayed that nothing would go wrong with the well this year because he didn’t know how he would handle that kind of predictable catastrophe, seemed every seven years or so there’d be a problem with the pump or a filter needed to be replaced, without the muscle of Deuce, Pearl, and Mary. He lived in near constant dread of that solar-powered pump failing. Lack of water haunted his dreams.
Some days, Bronson felt his age in his lower back and in the declining strength of his once-crushing grip. Once upon a time, on movie sets, Bronson could win a few extra hundred bucks arm wrestling men that outweighed him by 100 pounds. It sure beat scrappi
ng for real. Occasionally doubling Stallone on the ’87 ode to the “sport,” Over the Top, Bronson had also doubled his paycheck going head to head, or rather arm to arm, against the pros.
But now he found his greatest tools, his fingers, cramping and locked from time to time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t work his hands the way he used to do, but more like he could see the day fast approaching when he wouldn’t be able to. He’d need the next generation to work soon. He’d never really liked to hunt; it was more something he did to survive, and with Hyrum gone, there was less wild meat on the table. None of the young kids exhibited Hyrum’s natural joy for the hunt, exhilaration at perfecting his aim and skill, or sheer animal satisfaction of the kill. Yet the meals were kept generally similar for the kids to what they’d always been, with the exception of the countless mourning doves, white-tailed antelope squirrels, and black-tailed jackrabbit, as well as the occasional treat of mallard, and once in a blue moon a gray fox that Hyrum would ambush, arrow, and drag in for Yalulah to gut, clean, and cook.
The home school suffered as well without the leadership and kinship of the older kids, and neither Bronson nor Yalulah were any good at the visual arts that Mary excelled in and taught with such contagious verve. Yalulah was concerned that the level of instruction had taken a hit across the board, and that at the end of the year, they would be judged wanting with respect to what the Cucamonga kids learned. “This is bullshit, Bro’,” she said, “it’s rigged. They took three of our teachers away, out of five, and then they want to judge us as teachers?”
“The change was bound to come, Yaya, they just forced us into it a little early, I guess.”
“I don’t know that I can prepare them for standardized testing. That’s exactly the type of learning we shielded them from. That’s rote memorization to program robots. They’re making us play their game.”
“I know it’s frustrating, you’ve made a beautiful curriculum here.”
“It’s not a fair test.”
“No, it’s not. But the test doesn’t matter, Yaya,” Bronson would reply. “It’s really about survival. That’s the test. As it always is.”
“Why are we doing it, then? If the test doesn’t matter.”
“The test is the test. This has nothing to do with us versus them, or their way versus our way, their teaching versus ours. This is about us. This is a test of us. That’s the only test.”
“The test is the test?”
“Of our pride, and of our sins.”
“What sins?”
Bronson inhaled and looked down, stared down at something like a man peering into a well for a fallen child. But it was not a child who had fallen, he could see, as his eyes and his mind adjusted to the darkness, it was the light-bearing angel, Lucifer. He stared at the beast itself, and he blinked first. “Pride. Lust. Sloth. Jealousy. Our sins are innumerable and unnamable. We are human.”
“Then surely we are forgiven? Why do we have to pass a test to earn forgiveness for being as God made us?” Bronson didn’t answer. He didn’t want to and he couldn’t. He rubbed his forehead.
“You have a headache again? How long have you been getting headaches? Are you drinking water? We’re working harder, so you have to drink more water. Let me make you a banana-yucca poultice tonight,” his wife said, feeling for heat on his forehead.
“No,” he said, brushing Yaya’s hand aside and squeezing his head in his hands, “no headache.”
Yalulah fetched him a glass of water. “I put some poppy-root juice in it.”
“Thank you, Yaya,” he said. “If we survive,” he went on, “if we don’t crack and give in, we will win better terms. And mark me, we will survive.”
Yalulah took a deep breath and sighed. “I miss Mary.”
“I know you do.”
“And Jackie.”
“Yeah.”
“You miss her, too?”
“Sure, Yaya,” he whispered. “I miss her every day. Banana-yucca—she thought that was gonna save her life.”
“Bronson?” Yalulah paused a moment to signal that she wanted to steer the conversation into deeper waters.
“Uh-oh. Whenever you say my full name like that, I think some shit is gonna go down. You and Mary both. Lay it on me.” He made the comic face of a silent movie actor who just noticed a piano about to fall on him from above.
“No, baby, it’s just … I know that when Jackie died you had no one.”
Bronson shook his head. “I had you and Mary. I had my family. I had my work. I had my God.”
“No, Bro’, Mary and I fell into each other then, selfishly, I think. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for love. God is love.”
She took his hand. “We left you alone with your grief. We left you and Pearl alone with the grief.”
“Stop it, Yaya.”
“No. You need to hear this. We forced you away.”
Bronson removed his hand from hers. “No. No, I don’t. This is nothing but psychology. The things you are saying are not real to me, just words, false witness.”
“They do exist. Psychology exists. Exists every bit as much as God.”
“Not to me, Yaya. Not to me. I’ve got to work on the well. Excuse me.” Bronson went back to rubbing his head and walked away.
The younger children remained persistently plagued by fears of being taken away as their siblings had been. Yalulah saw it as a psychological reaction to trauma that called for talk of feelings and increased transparency and vulnerability. Bronson saw it as a weakness of faith that called for more scriptural study. Beautiful began to focus on Revelation in the bible, and she alluded often to a creeping unease about some unnamed “apocalypse,” a “rough beast” slouching, heading their way. Beautiful was convinced that the beast would take the shape of a huge fire in the form of a dragon, and fire was a real concern in the desert. There were small isolated wildfires that the family had confronted over the years, but nothing like the one Beautiful was convinced was coming now to consume them all. She adopted an obscure Joseph Smith utterance as a kind of half nursery rhyme, half mantra: “Noah came before the flood. I have come before the fire.”
This precocious thirteen-year-old girl mixed the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation with a literal reading of Dante, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and Frost’s “Fire and Ice” to create a horrifyingly detailed prophecy of doom. Pearl had been Beautiful’s mentor, confidante, and champion, always able to talk the imaginative girl off a ledge of her own making. Without Pearl’s mediating influence, Beautiful had a tendency to float off into a self-created darkness populated by her fantastical literary images. Yalulah could see the makings of a writer in the girl, and she encouraged Beautiful to keep a record of her images and stories—“She has an adult brain in a child’s body,” she told Bronson, “and we have to make sure that brain doesn’t destroy the body before it has a chance to grow up. The dragon fire stuff? That’s just puberty talkin’. Her mom is away and she’s about to hit puberty—perfect storm. She’s finding the wildest words to put on changes and feelings she can’t describe.”
“I don’t know about puberty, but she freaks me out sometimes,” Bronson said. “When she describes the dragon’s features, I swear to God, it’s like she’s describing me, the way I look. I feel like she’s afraid of me, pissed at me, judging me.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.” Bronson massaged his temples. “The other day, I woke up in the middle of the night and she was just standing in the doorway, staring at me, like in a bad horror movie. Like The Omen.”
Yalulah laughed at that pop culture callback, so Bronson laughed too. “Oh God, The Omen,” she said. “I haven’t thought of that crap in ages. Maybe you dreamed that.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“No,” Yalulah said, reaching out and rubbing Bronson’s head for him. “Every little girl loves her daddy.”
Bronson pulled back a bit from her touch and tilted his head instinctively, defensively at that seemin
gly harmless cliché. “You call her a writer,” he said, “but maybe she’s more of a prophet. That’s what scares me.”
“I’ve had the thought,” Yalulah said, “that watching Jackie suffer for so many years, maybe that was God opening the child up. Do you remember how she wouldn’t leave Jackie’s side and how involved she was with the rituals of the burial?”
“Yes. It was holy.”
“It was heartbreaking. And God forgive me, I was jealous. Jealous of how she loved that woman, jealous of how everyone did.”
Bronson looked at Yalulah, surprised at her vulnerability, and nodded. “That’s not psychology. That’s a sin.”
“I know it is,” she said.
Bronson accepted her confession. “Maybe,” he said, “that’s how God makes a prophet, by breaking the human early.”
“Like you?”
“I’m no prophet, Yaya, I can only see a few steps ahead. Barely. And I struggle for clues. I beg for scraps. Beautiful sees all the way through and it flows out of her in great articulation. God chooses to speak to her, not to me.”
“No, Bro’, no—she’s a writer. But she’s just a baby writer. You know, like baby rattlesnakes are the most dangerous ’cause they can’t control their venom? It’s like that. She hasn’t learned control yet, mastery. And a writer is a type of prophet anyway. Words are to the world as omens are to time.”
“Like Joseph Smith.”
“Yup. I hope she’s a better writer than he was.”
“She already is,” Bronson said.
They were both able to laugh at that, but Beautiful unsettled Bronson. Her gift of vision into words must’ve come down from God himself through Mary’s unnamed lover, for neither he nor Mary had the gift of words, and this facility remained foreign to him in the child, like a beguiling divine visitation. Her out-of-the-blue talent was evidence of God touching her, so all her words must be from God, he reasoned. Awe in front of a child in your charge was a vertiginous feeling. Although Yaya could allay his fears momentarily, he would often, more and more these days, go back to puzzling over her poetic pronouncements literally, trying to parse them for hidden prophecy and clues as one does with biblical texts. Fire began to consume him as well, though he kept its horrible fascination for him secret, hidden. Amid Beautiful’s fascination with the apocalypse, Little Big Al’s cancer talk, and Lovina’s fixation on buttholes, dinners with the remaining Powers could ping-pong into a lively, unsettling, surreal affair.
Truly Like Lightning Page 17
