He talked with obvious pride about Deuce leading a union drive at a fast-food place. He had a folded clipping from a local Rancho Cucamonga newspaper with the headline “17 Year Old Changemaker” comparing Deuce’s youth activism with that of the young survivors of Parkland. “‘And a child shall lead them,’” he said. “You know, I had always hoped the kids would want to come back to the desert when they grew up, but we taught them, we prepared them for the world as best we could while still holding them out of the world.”
“Then I showed up tripping balls.”
“We don’t blame you.”
“Anymore.”
“Anymore.”
“I guess that’s the way, huh? Kids leave.” She didn’t know.
Bronson said, “‘A man filled with the love of God is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.’”
“That’s nice. Who said that?”
“Joseph Smith.”
“Who? Never heard of him. I’m kidding. I’m just kidding.”
He got it, though, he gave her a laugh. He gets it. We can vibe, maybe. He’s not a total kook, she thought, maybe more like an eccentric collector of things like cars or baseball cards, only he collects the memorabilia of a religion. She would talk to him like he was a regular guy.
“I wonder if they have their high school boyfriends or girlfriends yet.”
“Who?”
“Deuce and Pearl.”
His aspect changed. “Oh, no.”
“Uh-oh—look at that face. You’re one of those dads, huh? Get-the-shotgun type?”
“What?” Bronson seemed puzzled and annoyed.
“No, I love it.” Maya backtracked a bit. “I wish I’d had a dad like that. It’s sexy. I mean, like, on somebody else’s dad it’s sexy, not on mine, on you.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’m just trying to say, it sounds like you did a good job raising the kids.”
Bronson seemed to come back to her a bit, from the uneasy place he’d just gone. “That’s bad news for your company. I can quote you, right? Game over.”
“I’ll deny it.” Maya forced a little smile. “I don’t want to talk business.”
Maya began to realize that what she liked about this man was how unpsychological he was, if that was a word. It was like he’d been born in a time before therapy, before Freud, before Christ even. She had subtly, she thought, brought up her own fatherless childhood for him to ask about, but he had declined as if that impulse never occurred to him. But it wasn’t that he was selfish, it was more that those types of details were insignificant in some larger truth to which he held the keys. He was like a Greek hero to her, like Odysseus, a man of action and integrity. His certainty was intoxicating, it informed his every movement—the way he stood tall, the way he walked, the way he touched things. She didn’t even have to agree with him to feel a bit drunk on it.
Bronson got up and started looking around. He kept thinking about an old SNL skit with Phil—who was it—Kevin Nealon? No, Bill, Phil … it was Phil Hartman who played a Neanderthal in hilariously bad prosthetic makeup, who is discovered frozen in ice, subsequently thawed and reanimated, and goes to law school and practices law in fur skins. So silly. But that’s what he felt like tonight. Like he’d been thawed out after centuries. Usually scripture floated to his mind, tonight it was network television. He couldn’t remember what it was called. Ice … Lawyer … Frozen-lawyer-man or something.
The little house was so spare and uncluttered. It looked like a “staging home.” Maya had no books. She watched Bronson roam around, snooping. “You look like you’re looking for clues,” she said.
“Where are all your books?”
“On my iPad.”
“I what?”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“No.”
“It’s a screen, like a portable electronic screen, can hold thousands of books.”
“Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer!” he said, and snapped his fingers.
“Say what now?”
“Nothing. Was just trying to remember something.” He tried describing the old skit to her; it was absolutely not funny in the telling, his retelling anyway. He gave up.
“Guess you had to be there,” she said with a smile.
“Just means I feel out of place. Out of place and out of time.”
“Saturday Night Live is still on, I think.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, I think it is.”
“Why?” He asked like it was an existential question.
“I don’t know, I’m just catching you up, I guess.”
“Oh, like a public service?”
“Precisely. We put a man on the moon, too.”
“Okay, that’s enough.”
“Still no woman president, though.”
“Well, I’m happy to see some traditions remain.”
“Okay, that’s enough, you.”
Maya felt like she might be taking part in the strangest rom-com in history. Then she remembered her mom’s favorite movie, Splash, which Maya had seen a hundred times, and thought if she fell for this sneakily charming Mormon cowboy-stuntman plural-marriage guy, it still wouldn’t be as weird as fucking a fish.
“It said ‘Parkland’ in that article about Deuce. What’s Parkland?” Bronson asked.
“A mass shooting at a Florida school. High schoolers were shot and killed by another student.”
“Like Columbine? Columbine was one of the reasons that made me want to raise kids away from the world.”
“Happens a lot.” She sighed. “We had shooter drills in my high school in Philly.”
“A lot? It’s happened since Columbine?”
“Over and over. Like once a year, at least. More. I think he killed about twenty.”
“With one gun?”
“It wasn’t, like, just a gun gun. It was a rifle, maybe many rifles, weapons of war. And there was that kid Dylann Roof who shot up a Black church.”
“A religious killing?”
“Religious/racial, I guess.”
“That is irredeemable. What kind of child kills like this?”
“Somebody that needs help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Psychological, I guess. Therapy.”
Bronson laughed scornfully. “Therapy? Talking will save his soul?”
“I don’t … I don’t know. To me, it’s more a gun-control issue,” she stammered.
“Gun control will save his soul? No. Only one thing will save his soul.”
Sometimes the lack of psychological dimension charmed her, sometimes it scared her. He was dizzying and very masculine in his lack of doubt. You would always know where you stood with this man. You might not fully like where you stood, but you’d know where you were. You’d be sane. She felt sane. Not like she did with so many of the slick whiny snakes she’d dated. Her rom-com had gone a little sideways, but even this intellectual frisson was kind of a new feeling on a date. Oh shit, she thought, is this kind of a date? Or a very odd good-old-fashioned Mormon booty call?
“Who gives an evil child a weapon of war?” Bronson asked sadly.
“We do. It’s not West Side Story anymore.”
Bronson shook his head and started to cry, deep, soul-shaking sobs. Maya felt he might shake the house itself. A Greek hero, and one that can cry. Jesus, that was attractive. Maya held him as he settled some, and he began to speak of Hyrum and Mary and how fucked up things were and that he wanted to go with her to Praetorian tomorrow and figure out a compromise with her boss. Holding him close, Maya noticed his odor filling up the living room. On the horse, in the great wide open, she had been into his musk, but inside, he seemed rank, unwashed, dirty, homeless. She thought about asking him to leave, but she didn’t want him to. She was curious to see beneath his armor. She offered him a shower and bed. He accepted.
While Bronson showered, Maya downed a couple shots of tequila to cal
m herself. She was excited, but also anxious, for reasons she could not entirely fathom at the moment. Well, there was a Mormon cowboy polygamist in her bathroom. When he’d come to her bed now, Bronson would smell like Maya, he was using her soaps. That day she’d visited at the ranch, they’d only kissed, they hadn’t made love. After that, she’d entertained idle fantasies about ditching the Praetorian Death Star and moving out to the desert to be with him, become a homesteading sister-wife, but she knew that was nuts—a silly daydream to pass the time between writing up Hammer film synopses.
But could she date him? Would the introduction of his three kids to the modern world be the beginning of his reintroduction as well? Could he stop with the gross polygamy and be her sexy, older cowboy boyfriend she could show off at parties to shame all these soft West Side men? He could be like her personal Christopher Lee, a tall, sexy, British actor who had played many a Dracula in Hammer films with a bounding physicality that made him much more appealing and dangerous to Maya than the lugubrious, more famous Bela Lugosi. Or better yet, her very own Brad Pitt, who had just made aging stuntmen sexy in the new Tarantino film.
And now here he was in her bed, her own wild man to play with, naked and smelling good of Goop and Sephora. She had made up so many preconceptions about the way a man like Bronson would make love that she was almost shocked when he got into bed that he didn’t have, like, multiple dicks or some secret fanfic kung fu fuck style. She’d half expected him to introduce her to some new position, or have a third nipple or a hidden compartment somewhere like he was of a different ancient species.
He kissed her. It was a nice kiss. She liked the roughness of his stubble. She got turned on but there were so many reasons why she thought this was a bad idea, it was gonna be hard for her to let go completely; plus it was the first time, and first times were always a little weird. She could feel his cock grow big and hard against her thigh. She could smell her own sudden arousal up from under the sheets.
“I can’t make love to you,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Oh, not until we’re married?” she teased. “What a pussy.”
He smiled. “Now you’re catching on.” She kissed him hard. He returned it, then pulled back slightly.
“You’re serious?” she asked.
“I’m serious.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Ah, the absurdity of my beliefs is key. Any lazy motherfucker could believe in a reasonable God.”
She widened her eyes and whistled, “Is that your pillow talk?”
He smiled. “Such as it is.”
“You got mad game, my Mormon friend. Mad game. That is so fucking hot,” she said, “so hot, it’s unfair. You’re just a tease?”
“I’m too old for you anyway.”
“Bullshit. We’ll see about that.”
She made an exaggeratedly funny and obvious move to dive under the sheets to give him head. He gently stopped her, but he laughed again at the comedic move. He found her beautiful and funny, and the strangeness with which she expressed herself charming. It had been so long since he related like this with a woman. He found the sheer chasm between them, her vast difference to him and distance from him, psychologically, spiritually, and chronologically attractive. They were from foreign lands. They had the appeal of time travelers for each other.
“Come up here,” he said, offering his chest to lay her head on. “I’m a tired old man. Let’s get some sleep.”
“I’ve never been turned down by a Mormon before,” she mused.
“How’s it feel?” he asked.
“Not bad,” she said, nestling into him, “not bad at all.”
Coiling up in his arms, she could feel his need was not sexual. He felt sad and strong, and unreachable. Whatever his desire was, it was unreadable to her, like an animal want. She’d never experienced anything like it in a man. This was a lark, she decided, but it would never work, and it shouldn’t work, not with the wager still on the table. He might as well be a fish. She would keep her eyes on the prize. But she was taken with him all the same, not just the idea of him. Why not give in to that a little? She could compartmentalize like a dude, she thought. She could enjoy a little of this exoticism and still bring the deal home.
She could tell by his breathing that he was already asleep. She twirled some of his graying chest hair around her finger. He was the first man she’d ever known who didn’t feel like he was trying to prove something to her or through her.
When she woke up alone, she wasn’t surprised. But then she saw his gun on the dresser and heard sounds in the house. She threw on a robe and shuffled through to the living room to see Bronson in the kitchen engaged in a staring contest with her professional-grade espresso machine.
“Morning.” Maya smiled. “What are you doing?”
“Good morning, Maya. I’ve been trying to figure out your goddamn coffeemaker for the past hour.”
“It’s a Breville—espresso. I thought Mormons didn’t drink coffee.”
“Exactly. I was actually trying to make you one.”
“Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer?” she asked.
“Ah, you listen.”
“That’s sweet of you to try,” she said, and made herself a double shot.
“You make it look so easy,” he said, sadly.
As they drove to Praetorian, Bronson was very interested in the workings of her Tesla. “What an amazing piece of technology,” he said. “It’s so quiet. I used to dig the sound of a big motor. Trying to save the planet. That’s admirable. Even in the desert I’ve seen big weather changes the last ten years. Climate change, you said? Dry season drier, wet season wetter. Life out of balance.” She applied some lipstick using her rearview mirror. “Oh, that’s what those are for,” he joked. “I never knew.”
She puckered and smiled. “Do you know what you wanna say to my boss? He doesn’t know the specifics of the deal and he doesn’t really want to.”
“Yeah,” Bronson said. “Maybe talk about selling some mineral rights.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe I’m good with the half/half deal, the first one you floated. I reckon that’s still hundreds of millions for you guys, and you leave us be, and you get the government off our backs.”
“I think that’s best for everyone,” Maya agreed.
She was unsure at this point, with the rocket-like ascendance of Deuce, offset by the less impressive gains made by Pearl and Hyrum, who would win this strange wager by the hazy metrics agreed upon. She had always hoped it didn’t have to come to that, so she was pleased and optimistic. This compromise should satisfy Malouf and Bronson, and bring tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions to Praetorian. It was a huge play, a great deal, a unicorn, and she had engineered it and brought it home.
“I don’t know about that,” Bronson said. “I think what’s best would’ve been for us to have been left the fuck alone.” They drove the rest of the way in silence.
Maya walked Bronson to Malouf’s office, and the boss put on his most gracious host persona. “Welcome, welcome, two of my favorites, sit, coffee?”
“No, thanks.” Bronson and Maya took seats across from him.
Malouf pointed at Bronson’s feet. “Love your boots, man—I can never wear them long enough to break ’em in—Ralph Lauren?”
“No.”
“Maya tells me you’re quite the horseman.”
“Sure.”
“Do you play polo?”
“Polo?”
Malouf held up a magazine with pictures from the sport for Bronson to see.
“Oh,” Bronson said. “No.”
“That’s a shame. What would you say is the most important thing about riding a horse?”
“Don’t fall off,” Bronson deadpanned. Malouf and Maya chuckled.
Maya knew that Bronson had a very low threshold for this kind of bullshit and small talk. And she knew that bullshit and small talk was all Malouf wanted to lead with. It was his
way of tiring out adversaries, bore the fuck out of them so they’d agree to his terms just to get away from him and his polo talk. She said, “Bronson has a deal in mind, a compromise. Win/win, I think.”
Malouf acted like Maya wasn’t in the room; he didn’t take his eyes off Bronson. “See,” Malouf continued, “I’m always talking to horse riders—jockeys, cowboys, mounted policemen even, to get an edge, as a polo player. I’m always looking to get better with the horses, that’s the key, I think. What’s the single most important thing between you, as a rider, and the horse? If you had to choose just one thing.” Malouf was grinning like this was a fun game they were about to play. Maya noticed his gums were receding. Bronson wasn’t smiling.
“Trust,” Bronson said finally.
“Ah, trust, that’s interesting, thought you might say that. I respectfully disagree, brother. You know what I think is the most important aspect of the horse-person relationship?” Bronson didn’t answer; he had begun focusing out the window at the ocean beyond. “Fear,” Malouf asserted. “The horse has to know who’s boss. Our dominance comes from their fear, then the trust comes, when the horse knows who the boss is.” He winked at Maya. Malouf noticed Bronson looking out his window at the Pacific. “You a sailor, too?” he asked.
“No.” Bronson stood up, walked to the window, and stared out, his head tilted to one side like a man watching a ship disappear into the horizon. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have to use the head. I’ll be right back.”
When Bronson walked out of the office, Maya knew he wasn’t coming back, and she’d most likely never see him again. Malouf took some phone calls, winking at Maya when an especially powerful figure called in, like she was part of the club, in on the big joke. “The Mnooch! How can I help?” he said at one point, mouthing silently to Maya, “Secretary Mnuchin…” while wiggling his eyebrows gleefully. “Loved you on Hannity last night, and love those ‘oppo zones.’ You’re a mad genius. You behind that Milken pardon? Ha—I knew it, you wily cunt! Let’s get the band back together again. You are lighting the path up ahead, my friend. Oh, I know it’s all you, I know the Kush is worthless, a fuckin’ puppy. And your hair is on point! How’s the lovely Louise?” Maya smiled tightly back and tried to look impressed.
Truly Like Lightning Page 28
