by Don Winslow
“Working on it,” Boland says. “Word is he’s some kind of Special Forces stud. SEALs or Green Berets or something.”
“Green Berets? They still got them?”
“I think.”
The other reason they meet in T.G.I. Friday’s is because it’s crowded and loud. Television up high, people yapping-you get a mike on this place, all you’re going to pick up is noise. And if someone’s wearing a wire it’s more likely to get some guy lying to a chick about his job than something a grand jury is going to get geeked about.
“What do the Powers That Be say?” Boland asks.
“What they always say,” Crowe answers. “‘Deal with it.’”
Deal with it and send us our fucking money. The Powers That Be don’t eat in franchises, they own them.
“This Leonard kid?” Crowe says. “He’s a piece of work-a real cocky asshole. Get on him, see if he slips on the banana peel.”
Boland looks at the menu. “You had the burgers here?”
Crowe surveys the line of divorcees at the bar.
“I’ve had everything here.”
30
When Chon gets to his apartment, O is there.
She has a key because she looks after the place when he’s gone.
Waters the single plant.
(No, not that kind of plant. Some innocuous plant, like a ficus or something.)
“I hope it’s okay I let myself in,” O says.
“Sure.”
She gives him this weird, un-O-like vulnerable look. “Chon?”
“O?”
“Don’t you think I’m sort of… Bambi-esque?”
31
“O,” Chon says, buying time. They’re pals, buddies. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“Maybe that will make it better,” O says. “And I’m nineteen now.”
Not a kid anymore.
“O-”
“Look, if you think I’m, like, hideous or something-”
“It’s not that,” Chon says. O is the opposite of hideous-whatever that is. “I think you’re beautiful.”
He means it.
“And you love me,” she says.
He nods.
“And I love you, so…”
He shakes his head, smiles stupidly. “O… I don’t know…”
“Chon,” she says, “you’re going away… and I don’t know if
… and it’s my fault-”
“No, it isn’t.”
32
O’s first conscious memory was of a boy pissing on marigolds.
“Ophelia” then-it would be years before she dropped the “phelia” and became just “O”-sat in the playground of the little school and watched the older boy water the plants.
The school in Laguna Canyon was one of those neo-one-room schoolhouses-kindergarten through eighth grade-that operated under the theory that children learn best when not arbitrarily separated into rigid grade groups but allowed to find their own levels among kids of various ages.
This was during one of Paqu’s progressive phases, so every day she hauled her four-year-old daughter from their seven-digit home in gated Emerald Bay to the funkier environs of the canyon. The house and the money for the private school came from her settlement with O’s father, who divorced her in the sixth month of her pregnancy.
Even the teachers at the school thought that Ophelia was too young to start kindergarten.
“She’s precocious,” her mother answered.
“But still four,” the principal said.
“She’s an old soul,” the mother countered. Her psychic had told her that her daughter had had many previous incarnations and that her astral age wasn’t four, but four thousand, which made her older than her mother by a good seven hundred years. “In very real ways, I’m actually her daughter.”
The principal decided that Ophelia would probably benefit from getting out of the house for a few hours a day, and besides, the little girl was such a darling, already so beautiful, and so smart.
“I think we made a huge mistake sending you to that school,” Paqu would say years later when O was flunking virtually every class at Laguna High.
By that time, Paqu was in one of her conservative phases. And, by that time, Ophelia had changed her name to O and had started calling her mother Paqu.
But that was all later, and right then O was watching the boy water the flowers. At first she thought it was just like the gardener at home, but then she observed that the boy wasn’t holding a hose, but something else; then she heard a short, sharp shriek and a teacher ran over and grabbed the boy.
“John,” the teacher said. “Our private parts are what?”
John didn’t answer.
“ Private, ” the teacher answered for him. “Now zip up your jeans and go play.”
“I was just watering the flowers,” John said.
O thought that was very fun, that this magical boy could water the plants all by himself.
“What’s that boy’s name?” she asked when the teacher came over to her.
“That’s John.”
“Chon,” O mispronounced, and then got up to go look for the magical boy who, penis safely returned to his jeans, had wandered around toward the back fence searching for an escape route.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!” O hollered, wandering around in search of him. “Chon, play with me!”
The other kids quickly picked up the chant.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!”
The name stuck.
O became his shadow, followed him around like a baby duckling, a real pest, but it wasn’t long before Chon learned to put up with her, to become her protector, even to like her a little. Chon wasn’t particularly social, he didn’t “play well with others,” preferred to be alone, so the teachers were glad to see him make a connection.
O adored him.
The problem was that he disappeared from time to time-sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week-and then he’d be back at school again.
“Where you been, Chon?” she’d ask him.
Chon would make up fantastic stories for her:
He was out fishing and had been captured by pirates; elves who lived in the canyon took him for a trip to their secret world; aliens from another galaxy flew him into outer space and back again. Chon took the girl to China, to Africa, to Mars and the Mountains of the Moon, and he was her magic boy.
Then, one day, he disappeared for good.
When she realized that he wasn’t coming back, O cried all night.
Her mother consoled her with the words “Men don’t stay.”
O already knew that.
33
“So you’re saying, what?” she asks Chon now. “No?”
“No, I’m saying not now.”
“What a totally wussy answer,” she says.
“I’m a total wuss.”
She backs off.
“Okay,” she says, “you missed your chance, Chonny boy. That was it.”
Chon smiles. “Got it.”
34
It’s funny Chon doesn’t talk much, because he loves words and word origins.
He even knows the etymology of the word “etymology.”
(Google it.)
But O gets that you protect what you love and hold it close. Defending his reticence one day, Chon posited a question to them “Words,” he said, “are:
(a) A means of communication
(b) A means of mis communication
(c) Tools
(d) Weapons
(e) All of the above.”
Ben answered (a), O answered (d)
(she is her mother’s daughter),
Chon answered
(f) It doesn’t matter.
Because there are things he will not talk about. Things he has seen, things he has done in IraqandAfghanistan. Things you don’t burden other people with, memories that you try to prevent from overwhelming your brain and your nervous system, but that you can still feel on your skin. Movies that your mind priv
ately screens on the inside of your eyelids.
These are things that you do not put into words.
They are ineffable.
Therefore, to fill the sad silence — underscored by O’s chant of I hate this trip I hate this trip I hate this trip — on the ride to John Wayne-Orange County Airport (you cannot make this shit up) Chon goes neo-Spiro Agnew on the subject of neo-hippies.
35
Chon thinks that neo-hippies are grungy, pasty-faced-from-vegan-diets (“Eat a fucking cheeseburger, Casper”), patchouli-oil-stinking, Birkenstock-wearing, clogging up sidewalks playing hacky sack (why don’t they save syllables and just call it a dirtbag), leaning their crappy single-gear bicycles against the doors of Starbucks, where they order Tazo green tea and borrow other people’s laptops to check their e-mail, sitting there for hours and never leave a freaking tip, doing semi-naked yoga in parks so other people have to look at their pale, emaciated bodies, parasites.
Chon wishes Southern California would secede from the rest of the state so it could pass a law sending any white guy with dreadlocks to a concentration camp.
“Where would the camp be?” Ben asks him.
This is known as “egging him on.”
“I don’t know,” Chon mutters, still pissed. “Somewhere off the fifteen.”
The problem (okay, one problem) with building concentration camps in Southern California, Ben thinks, is that contractors would trip all over each other trying to rig the barbed-wire bid. Also that you have a governor whose accent is, well…
… uhhhh…
“Of course,” Chon mumbles, “I suppose liberals would block it.”
Chon also hates liberals.
The only liberal he doesn’t hate is Ben.
(This is known as the Ben Exemption.)
Liberals, Chon will opine when he’s on a rant-and he’s on one now — are people who love their enemies more than their friends, prefer anyone else’s culture to their own, are guilty of success but unashamed of failure, despise profit and punish achievement.
The men are dickless, sackless, self-castrated eunuchs cowed into shame of their own masculinity by joyless, anger-filled shrews consumed with bitter envy at the material possessions,
not to mention multiple orgasms, of their conservative sisters (“You should have stopped him buying The Fountainhead, ” Ben tells O.
“Who knew he was in the fiction section?”)
Liberals took a pretty decent country and
Fucked It Up to the point where kids can’t read Huckleberry Finn or play dodgeball — dodgeball, that perfectly Darwinian game meant to ensure the survival of the fittest because the others are too perpetually concussed to propagate — and any dune surfer with a grudge feels he can fly planes into our buildings without fear of the Big One being dropped on Mecca like it should have been five seconds after the towers came down (Nancy Reagan would have pressed her husband’s finger on the button for him and turned the Saudi peninsula into the glass factory it deserves to be)
— except that liberals want to be loved.
Ben disagrees The liberals in the California State Legislature would not block a bill creating concentration camps as long as they got campaign contributions from the concrete manufacturers, the drivers hauling the inmates through the gates were unionized, and their trucks had the requisite minimum MPG standards and used the commuter lanes.
Ben knows California would be zapping guys at the pace of the Texas Versus Florida Bush Brothers Sibling Rivalry if the electric chair were solar powered.
“They don’t use Sparky anymore,” Chon tells him. “It’s lethal injection.”
Right.
Narcotics are illegal, so we use them to execute people.
For crimes.
36
Anyway, this is all well and good verbal fun and games but what matters isn’t what Ben and Chon say to each other, it’s what they don’t.
Chon doesn’t tell Ben about Sam Casey getting ripped off and beaten up, and his response to said provocation, because Ben wouldn’t approve and he’d get all bummed out about the necessity of force in a world that’s supposed to be about love and peace, blah blah.
Ben doesn’t tell Chon about the weird interaction with OGR because, well, it’s just weird and random and probably nothing, and besides, what’s Chon supposed to do about it? He’s on his way to the Stan, he has enough to worry about (like staying alive), so Ben doesn’t want to bother him.
And so they miss this critical junction, this intersection of events, this opportunity to put one and one together and get
One.
One same problem.
They’re not stupid, they would have put it together, but “would have” is just another way of saying
“didn’t.”
37
They walk Chon as far as the security line.
Where O hugs him and won’t let go.
“I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you,” she says, unable to stop the tears.
“I love you, too.”
Ben pries her off, hugs Chon himself, and says, “Don’t be a hero, bro.”
As if, Ben thinks.
Chon’s on his third deployment with a fucking SEAL team. He is a fucking hero and he can’t be anything but.
Always has, always will.
“I’ll be cowering at the bottom of the deepest foxhole,” Chon says.
Yeah.
They watch him go through the line.
38
Boland gets on the phone.
“Good news,” he says. “Leonard is putting the hard case on an airplane. Looks like he’s deploying.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“He meets Hennessy’s description of the guy who trashed him,” Boland answers.
That is good news, Crowe thinks.
Very good news.
Well, not for Leonard.
39
Ben doesn’t see the car that follows him out of John Wayne-Orange County Airport and stays behind him all the way to Laguna.
Why should he?
That isn’t his world, he’s bummed about Chon leaving, and then O drops this bombshell:
“I threw myself at him.”
“Who?”
“Chon.”
Boom.
He’s not jealous-jealousy isn’t in Ben’s makeup-but Chon and O?
It’s huge.
But Ben is cool. Ben is always cool. “And?”
“I bounced off.”
The Wall of Chon.
“Oh.”
“Rejected. Spurned. Un requited.”
“You never hear about ‘requited love,’” Ben says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“ I don’t, anyway.”
“Pouting doesn’t look good on you.”
“Really?” O says. “Because I thought it did.”
A few seconds later she says, “I hate this fucking war.”
She was fourteen, watching TV that morning, stalling going to school when she saw what she thought was cheesy CGI come across the screen.
An airliner. A building.
It didn’t seem real and still doesn’t.
But Chon was already in the service by then.
A fact for which she blames herself.
Ben knows what she’s thinking.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Can’t help it.”
She can’t because she doesn’t know
It isn’t her fault
It goes back
Generations.
Laguna Beach, California 1967
Said I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm,
Going to join in a rock-and-roll band…
— JONI MITCHELL, “WOODSTOCK”
40
John McAlister rolls his skateboard down Ocean Avenue, then puts the board under his arm and walks along Main Beach up to the Taco Bell, because sometimes guys get their food, then go into the men’s room and leave their tacos on the table.
Dig young Johnny Mac.
Tall for his fourteen years, wide shoulders, long brown hair that looks like it was cut with hedge clippers. Your classic grem-T-shirt and board shorts, huaraches, shell necklace.
When he makes it up to Taco Bell there’s a crowd standing around.
Big guy with long blond hair is buying food for everybody, handing out tacos and those little plastic packets of hot sauce to a bunch of surfers, hippies, homeless drug casualties, runaways, and those skinny girls with headbands and long straight hair who all look alike to John.
The guy looks like some kind of SoCal surfer version of a sea god. John wouldn’t know Neptune or Poseidon from Scooby-Doo, but he recognizes the look of local royalty-the deep tan, the sun-bleached hair, the ropy muscles of a guy who can spend all day every day surfing and who has money anyway.
Not a surf bum, a surf god.
Now this god looks down on him with a friendly smile and warm blue eyes and asks, “You want a taco?”
“I don’t have any money,” John answers.
“You don’t need money,” the guy answers, his face breaking into a grin. “ I have money.”
“Okay,” John says.
He’s hungry.
Guy hands him two tacos and a packet of hot sauce.
“Thanks,” John says.
“I’m Doc.”
John doesn’t say anything.
“You have a name?” Doc asks.
“John.”
“Hi, John,” Doc says. “Peace.”
Then Doc moves along, handing out tacos like fishes and loaves. Like Jesus, except Jesus walked on water and Doc rides on it.
John takes his tacos before Doc changes his mind or anyone there makes him as the kid who filches food off tables, goes out into the parking lot, and sits down at the curb beside a girl who looks like she’s nineteen or twenty.
