4 Toby Neal- Broken ferns

by Neal, Toby

  Time to find out whatever Consuelo had chosen to write down about the Smiley Mafia. She opened the notebook and picked up the camera from her crime kit to photograph each page for the briefing that would doubtless come later.

  Dear Diary,

  We buried my father today.

  I think he would have liked the funeral. My aunty cried a lot, and at least ten people came from work. There was good music from his favorite ukulele band. Father Sing was really articulate, talked a lot about how hardworking he was, what a kind, generous man and a loving father.

  All true. At one time.

  I blame the cancer, drunken drivers, and the airline for all that wasn’t said in the eulogy—like how he got to be ninety-seven pounds and how he started hitting me and Aunty. How he called me a bitch and a whore when I tried to take care of his bedsores and change the ileostomy bag. How he cried at night and it sounded like cats fighting on a fence, and I started wearing earplugs because I was in the room with him, trying to sleep on a futon.

  The room smelled like urine and rotten fruit that I never could find to get rid of. I wanted to just shoot him up with the morphine a dozen times, but when I loaded the syringe, I just couldn’t do it.

  The only time he was a little bit okay was when we watched movies. Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was his favorite, the old version with the funny-looking Oompa Loompas. Like Charlie’s grandparents in the movie, he made me get in bed with him to watch.

  And I could do it, because for a little while we both forgot how sick he was. We watched that movie twenty-seven times.

  I know. I counted.

  Dying can change people. It’s changed me, that’s for sure.

  Lei photographed the entry on the last page, her heart aching for the young girl in the oversized scrubs she knew was lying on a molded plastic bed with no hard corners.

  Dear Diary,

  Something people don’t seem to realize is how many of us it takes to make Hawaii paradise. An army of invisible people with vacuums, and hedge trimmers, and chef hats.

  I’m a foot soldier in that army.

  Daddy’s funeral was three days ago and I’m back at work. I wear Carhartts. Even in the lightest fabric they make, it’s hot, and I’m a sexless little Oompa Loompa in them, with my tool belt and billed hat. Lucky to have the job—even I know that. And thanks to Daddy, I know my way around both a splitter and a spanner.

  It’s the only thing he left me.

  Maintenance Department pays about three times what being a maid would, another reason to sweat in my coverall. Aunty offered to get me in at the Sheraton doing rooms—she has cousins who work there—but I like maintenance better. Even the Carhartt is better than their outfits.

  Oompa Loompas? Oh yeah. Only, the maids aren’t sexless. They wear little fitted white dresses. Somehow, even when on a schedule of fifteen minutes per room (twenty max, if there’s been puke and parties), they’re supposed to look cute and keep that outfit clean. It’s part of the “ambiance” of the hotel, Aunty says.

  They get $8.50 an hour and work like dogs.

  I’ll take my hot Carhartts any day.

  Dear Diary,

  The Boyfriend tried to cheer me up after work today. It’s been two weeks since Daddy died, and I’m apparently still not a happy camper. He picked me up in his truck, took me to the beach. We went to Waikiki, the part just past the dragon boats where locals like to surf.

  “You need to remember the good times.” He gave me blue-eye sincerity along with some carnations from Foodland—Mainland flowers. I gave him some stink-eye in return.

  I unzipped out of the Carhartts in the passenger seat of his truck. I just wear a jog bra and a pair of bike shorts under it, and I could see by the way he was breathing that it was getting to him. Good. I like to get to him. I wriggled out of the Carhartts. He was looking out the window, but I could tell by his lap something was going on down there.

  “I want a cold drink. Get one for me.”

  “What do you mean?” He blinked. He’s adorable, really cute for a haole boy, but not that bright.

  “Go to the store and get me one. Steal it if you have to.” I took down my hair. I keep it in a braid wound up in a bun under my hat, but it’s long, goes past my butt. I undo the braid, pull my fingers through it, fluff it over my body like I don’t know what I’m doing.

  Black, shiny, and full of ripples, it’s pretty. He got kind of glazed looking, watching me, and got out of the truck and headed back toward the hotels. I kept busy getting myself in the mood. When he got back, he had my favorite drink, an ice-cold Monster, the sixteen-ounce size with the lid.

  “Yay!” I drained half of it and then rewarded both of us. Beach towels rolled up into the tops of windows make a nice privacy tent.

  I didn’t feel invisible, at least for a little while. We’ll see how long it lasts.

  Dear Diary,

  Called in sick and lay in bed all day. I’m sick all right—sick of life.

  I could die back here and no one would notice. If I hold my hands up, I can see the veins in them, shadows under the skin hinting of the rivers inside. There are rivers inside me, black flowing passages leading to my heart.

  How many days would it take for anyone to miss me? I imagine my blood filling the bed as I let that river out, soaking the mattress like a giant tampon. The smell, that fresh tingly iron smell, becoming a hot, sweet stink. Me swelling and turning colors and maggots filling my eyes.

  Probably, with my luck, it would be my baby cousin coming in here that would find me, and the poor kid would be in therapy for life. I can’t do that to the family. But this can’t go on.

  I need something to DO.

  I want to be like the guy in Fight Club who woke up to have everything taste amazing, like after Tyler held the gun to his head.

  It all tastes like sawdust now.

  Dear Diary,

  I’m spending more and more time at the Boyfriend’s house. We lie on his mattress on the floor and watch Fight Club. I think I have most of the lines memorized by now. This scene still stands out, where Tyler’s steering down the wrong side of the road into traffic and says, “What did you want to do with your life?”

  Jack doesn’t know, and as they are blazing into the headlights, he admits he doesn’t know and he doesn’t feel good about it.

  Yeah. That’s me. That’s my life. I don’t feel anything good about it.

  I tried speed the other day; Sheila stole it from her ADHD brother and swore it would make me feel better. I just got hyper and cleaned the Boyfriend’s whole damn place, and then I was pissed off because that was all I could think of to do with all that energy—clean that place.

  So I took one of the Boyfriend’s hoodies and went out and stole some shit from a store. But I didn’t want it for myself. I don’t need anything. All that energy, I went down to Ala Moana Park with a nice T-shirt and a pair of Reeboks I’d stuck in my pockets.

  I gave the stuff to this homeless guy, and he smiled, and I wished I’d got him a toothbrush too. Maybe I’ll do that next time. It felt a lot better than housecleaning made me feel, even than sex with the Boyfriend makes me feel.

  Fight Club is my gospel—and right now I’m redistributing wealth. Maybe that’s what I need to do with my stupid little meaningless Oompa-Loompa life.

  Something big. Something amazing. Something totally fucked up.

  Here’s my symbol:

  *smiley face with hooked mouth*

  So that’s where the smiley face came from. Lei got up and got a glass of water, staring sightlessly out the window at the lackluster view off her deck, absorbing what she’d read. Then she went back and took pictures of pages filled with smiley faces with their distinctive twisted mouth.

  Consuelo had found her mission and her signature.

  Dear Diary,

  Daddy used to let me into the hangar when he was working on the planes. Under their swelling white bellies were secret panels that opened. I was reminded of the tonton in
that Star Wars movie. All these guts are in there, and I was so small, he could boost me up inside and then, on his ladder, he’d show me everything he was doing as we checked all the parts and did a replacement of anything frayed, or broken, or burned out. He was on the Scheduled Maintenance crew, and after every three hundred hours of flight time, the plane would come in for a thorough work over.

  If people knew how seriously Daddy took his job, how he’d hold up even a little fuse and frown at it like it committed a crime if it burnt out—they’d feel safer.

  Mr. Smiley was always trying to get him to speed up, do more, fudge on replacement parts. The FAA had a quality-assurance list, and Daddy showed it to me—all the things on each model of plane that could be replaced to keep the plane in tiptop shape. But Mr. Smiley thought it was too “conservative” and told him to lie.

  He wouldn’t.

  In the end, that’s why I think Mr. Smiley wouldn’t give him leave when he got sick. He’d already been writing him up for every little thing, trying to fire him. It makes me so mad when I think about it—that man, with so much, wouldn’t let Daddy keep so little—his health care and his job.

  Dear Diary,

  The Boyfriend and I drove out to Max Smiley’s Kaneohe estate—I’d found out the address by hanging around with that bigmouthed bitch Reynalda, who seems to feel guilty for what happened to Daddy. It wasn’t hard to park the truck and walk down the beach through the public access. The Boyfriend wondered why I wanted to go to that particular beach, why I insisted even.

  I made him haul the towels, radio, and cooler all the way down the beach, and we set up on the beach in front of the Smileys’ great big mansion.

  I didn’t tell him why, because I don’t quite know why. Yet. But I think Tyler Durden would know. I wish he were real and would tell me what to do.

  After the Boyfriend fell asleep in the sunshine, I sneaked up onto the grounds. Nobody around, no security to speak of, and the door open on the most glorious storage barn I’d ever seen.

  I don’t have my driver’s license yet, but there are a number of vehicles I wouldn’t mind taking out for a spin. My favorite is a tiny silver ultralight plane, as classy a vehicle as a solid chrome Porsche, parked right in the front facing the mini landing strip, begging to take off. Daddy showed me the basics on flying, and with a little Internet research, I’m sure I could figure it out.

  That’s when the little dog came yapping up. I knelt down behind a bush and tried to shush her. She’s a Chihuahua with a Napoleon complex. That just made her madder, and she barked so hard, she flew up in the air on each bark: “Riff! Riff! Riff!”

  Her little bat ears were down, and she looked kind of scary for a two-pound dog. She’s brave, and I like that. I gave her a piece of mochi I had in the pocket of my shorts, and that shut her up chewing—and I made my getaway.

  That tiny silver plane is some kind of sweet. Bet Max Smiley would miss it if it were gone.

  Dear Diary,

  I told the Boyfriend what I’m planning. He was pretty shocked, I could tell. “I need you for what I have in mind,” I told him. “I can’t do it without you.”

  He loves that stuff, really eats it up. Probably from having nobody care about him. So I’m not just doing it for me. I’m doing it for him and for all the people we’ll help—the Oompa-Loompa army of have-nots that really run our islands.

  He watched Fight Club with me again because I said we had to. Smiley Mafia is all in there—it’s our Project Mayhem.

  This time he seemed to get it, and he said, “We need someone to tell our story. We need people to get behind us, to try the one percent in the court of public opinion.”

  The reporter was his idea.

  I’m not sure about her. She’s got a sharp nose, and I can tell she doesn’t care beyond the story. But the Boyfriend insists she can be useful and will help us in the end if we get caught. We’re juveniles, at least, he says. He has a whole plan he’s talking about—he calls it Plan B.

  Plan B. That’s the thing. I don’t have one.

  There’s only Smiley Mafia.

  *smiley face*

  Lei set aside the last page of Consuelo’s journal. She got up, paced around the apartment holding Angel. She wondered what Consuelo had been thinking, leaving the diary in such an easy place to find—maybe it was a sort of extended suicide note, because it was clear from the pages that she’d never planned to survive her stint as the Smiley Bandit.

  The pages filled with round, precise, girlish handwriting drew Lei back. She picked up the camera. It was all here—the inspiration for the Smiley Mafia, the direction Consuelo’s anger had taken and how it had morphed into a bold, suicidal series of burglaries. There was anger there, there was revenge—but there wasn’t murder.

  Someone had taken things in a different direction after Consuelo’s capture. One of her conspirators, maybe the Boyfriend, was using Consuelo as a martyr, a figurehead.

  Lei had to talk to the girl again, with the journal pages and pictures of the Smileys’ bodies on the floor of the shell of their house in her hand.

  That ought to jar the Smiley Bandit out of her catatonic state.

  Chapter 25

  Lei e-mailed the photos of the journal to all the team members and called to leave a message on Ken’s voice mail on the way in to Tripler Hospital, relieved he hadn’t picked up and insisted she attend some departmental briefing where they all rehashed what they knew and got assignments—she knew the drill by now, and it continued to annoy. The grilling Waxman had given her at the Smiley bomb site still smarted—she really didn’t think there was more she could have done to stop the unsub’s escape, and she considered herself lucky to just be walking with a limp.

  Lei showed her badge and was admitted to Consuelo’s room.

  The girl was looking better, sitting upright and reading a celebrity magazine in the sunlight coming from the window. Lei glanced at the small, high aperture above the bed—wire threaded the glass, and there was no latch to open. In the closed space of the room, a smell of socks competed with burger cooking somewhere not far away. Lei thought this setting would drive her insane in less than a week.

  “Hi, Consuelo.” The girl looked up but didn’t return the greeting. Lei set her phone, on Video Record, on a chair she dragged in from outside. She pointed the phone’s recording eye at Consuelo and stated the date, time, and location. She remembered from the journal that many of Consuelo’s deepest feelings were associated with movies, with the themes and stories they explored.

  “So, is this feeling like a scene from Girl, Interrupted?” Lei asked, as she sat on the edge of the built-in bed, the journal in its evidence bag resting on her lap. “Glad to see you looking better.”

  Consuelo’s eyes narrowed and flicked to the bag. “What’s that?”

  “You know what it is.” Lei took the marbled school notebook out of the brown paper bag. “Found it under your bed at your aunty’s.”

  “That’s private,” Consuelo said.

  Lei shook her head. “You know this has gone well beyond that. I’ve got to tell you some stuff and show you some pictures.”

  Lei took crime-scene photos of out of where she’d tucked them in the marble notebook, quashing a momentary qualm about whether she was doing the right thing. She hadn’t checked with Dr. Wilson, who’d very nicely asked her to, or her partner or Waxman—but if Lei could get Consuelo to talk, she might be able to get out of the hot water Waxman had her bubbling in. Something had to snap the girl out of her stubborn silence on the subject of the Smiley Mafia and the whereabouts of Rezents and Blackman.

  “Some things have happened since you went in here.” Lei started with the photos of the Kahala estate, spreading them in a fan in front of Consuelo. “We knew right away, looking at these, that someone with a totally different and much more destructive style was taking the movement you’d started in a new direction.”

  Consuelo looked at the photos of the home destruction without responding. Her long hair h
id her face—but Lei saw her full mouth twitch, and she picked up of the photos of the spray-painted slogans and smiley-face logos with a slight grimace, quickly smoothed away.

  “Smiley Mafia is meant to be a virus, to spread.”

  “Well, it has. And it’s gone deadly.” Lei laid a picture of the burnt, mutilated bodies of the Smileys, their clawed hands reaching for each other in a nest of ashes, on the bed in front of the girl.

  Consuelo gasped, and her hand covered her mouth as her big, long-lashed eyes looked up from the horrific scene. “What—who is this?” she asked.

  “Max Smiley and his wife, Emmeline. A bomb was planted in their house and went off only hours after I was there and returned Angel to them.”

  “Oh my God. Angel.” Tears welled, spilled. The girl looked back down at the grisly photo.

  Lei had already decided not to say anything about Angel being safely ensconced in her apartment until she’d gotten all the information she could out of the girl. After all, this case had crossed into the realm of a terrorist investigation, and Lei’s interview was likely to be the kindliest the girl was in for. Ken had let her know that Homeland Security was going to be interviewing Consuelo, and Lei was glad to have beaten them to the hospital.

  “It’s bad, Consuelo. Please tell me where Rezents and Blackman are, what their roles are. Trust me. You’d rather talk to me about this than the guys from Homeland Security. They could come anytime, and I’m pretty sure Dr. Wilson won’t be able to keep you protected in here—they’re all about stopping domestic terrorism, which your case has become. If you tell me what you know and we are able to intervene, we can probably end this thing before it gets any worse for you—and for your friends.”

  Consuelo looked up at Lei. Inner conflict was revealed in the drawn line of her brows, the scrunched set of her mouth, the shine of tears in her dark eyes. “I never meant for anyone to die but me.”