Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  In the early hours, avoiding the risk of hot noon winds and brushfire, Hogan had conducted the first burn. “You didn’t wake us?” Tee had asked, fully betrayed when they’d found out in the morning. Their school hadn’t started yet so they’d spent a couple of days here trailing Hogan who clearly lives near the eye of action. But wouldn’t the guy have known two boys would have wanted to see a burn? Flames licking brush, an incinerated slope, and Hogan hadn’t even bothered to apologize for seeming to forget the boys’ existence, but there could be no predicting adults: they always needed stricter guidelines for their behavior.

  “You got to control damage,” Hogan says as hello, wearing enviable thigh-high rubber boots the gray hue of all important uniforms. “Once I’m done watering, we’ll light up the next slope.”

  The twins pay attention to this we which bodes well. Next to lopped-off trees they wait, branches bending toward Sedge like friendly gnomes. The day before, Hogan had explained that just behind Hope was a zen monastery called Pol, a place where adults come to sit on cushions so they can imagine their bodies turning into skeletons. “I don’t need cushions to imagine my skeleton!” Tee had bragged. But this was how the zen people put what they call detachment from life into action, Hogan had said, they like being thick in this region’s dangers because we got plenty to go around, mudslides, quakes, you name it. Mainly, though, it is Hope’s fires that lick up these ravines faster than anyone can say Alexander Pfuffelmacher.

  Alexander what?

  Hogan had explained all this on the way down the path to meet the chief of the monastery, a guy named Abbott Chuck, someone the boys had liked sort of, even if the abbott turned out to laugh at their jokes a little too quickly, one of those adults who act as if some teacher had once told him you could be a better person if you just cherished the humor of little kids more. The boys had stuck around to overhear that, as part of some neighborly venture in fire management, Abbott Chuck had asked Hogan to clear brush on two Hope hills and that the controlled burn should start today.

  Watching Hogan finish watering down the burnt slope, Sedge startles when someone sneaks up on them from behind, doing peekaboo hands: Zabelle, the waitress from the coffee shop still wearing her apron, the waitress who calls them darlings. Tee likes her more than Sedge does. Her teeth are fake white and fascinating to the boys, remnants of a bad accident on Five, after which, she told them, she’d thought she could live off insurance money for years. She also used to think she could have kids. Now, she told them, she’s done thinking, she’s a waitress, take it or leave her, still loves kids, darling, and each time the boys visit the coffee shop she gives them a free glazed and goes on a long cigarette break, leaving travelers and cops waiting on their third coffee. “Fig ’em,” she tells the boys that first time, acting if they are capable of understanding the sloppiness of adult justice. “Customers don’t know what’s good. Too much joe and cophearts explode. I’m helping out. Too much caffeine and drivers speed, cops slap more tickets, so it’s good people learn about waiting. I’m actually doing them a service.”

  Zabelle tells the boys about her stillborn kid, how unlike other people in her support group she’s the kind stays sweet on other people’s kids and then goes and calls her lost kid Pez, which makes Tee laugh so Sedge does mop-up, Sedge’s face an apology for his brother, Sedge the kid born to do mop-up, according to what their mother had once said.

  On the slope, Tee and Zabelle start commenting on Hogan’s new burn, acting as if it is some game’s last inning but Sedge can’t take the crowd: the fire makes him have to sneak away to a private spot behind the red madrone so he can fist Lestrion out of his pocket. Only the robot’s gamma-ray deflectors have gotten bent and so what if everyone else thinks the deflectors are Q-tips, Sedge knows better.

  “What?” Sedge is hoarse in whispering down to his friend.

  THE MOTHER’S BACK. Lestrion speaks in code. He doesn’t always favor Sedge with clear messages. Sometimes static prickles the line, but when Lestrion’s instructions are clear, Sedge pays attention. THE MOTHER’S—

  “Which mother?” Sedge almost cries; this is his least favorite part of Lestrion, how often the robot talks in secret code.

  YOUR MOTHER’S.

  “Grandma Jennie?”

  THE ONE SHE DOESN’T TALK ABOUT.

  Now Lestrion’s face turns mute, immovable. Having delivered his piece, he closes back into being a tongue depressor with Q-tips force-bonded into arms, a head wrapped round with ratty rubber-bands, a god good at absorbing Sedge’s ability to believe.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 2:27 P.M.

  The blue-and-red striped wallpaper pulses, the lawyer with her pearls pulses and all Lana has to do is let go, speaking some sequence to spin energy in the right direction: it is like being in the first moments of a love affair with all the words tumbling out. She winds up her speech with a final word: “Crazy.”

  “Wonderful,” says the interviewing lawyer, chinless, twisting her pearls before turning off the tape. She then addresses Hogan and Rose, as if they are deaf and yet should know the caliber of a star student. “Won-der-ful.”

  Rose grimaces. “Why?”

  “This kind of deposition will stand up in court. Miss Fukuji-Mahler is articulate. Her recall is specific. Despite the strong feeling she shows.”

  “It’s not just show,” mumbles Miss Fukuji-Mahler.

  This new pearled lawyer whom Rose has located seems not wholly adept to Lana, fumbling with tape machine and briefs on a desk that, given the rueful thumbprints on its dark wood, Rose had whispered, looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the sugar-made-me-do-it insanity defense back in the seventies.

  Rose chooses to mention more loudly this Twinkie precedent. Apparently the idea that a sugar spike in the blood could prompt uncharacteristic violence in an offender prompts a coughing fit in the lawyer. After she recovers, the lawyer waves off her embarrassment, gathering herself enough to explain. “No, Vic Mahler’s defense rests on a far more contemporary concept. The basis for his defense will be, as I understand it, our newer idea of the victim-offender.”

  “The victim-offender,” Hogan repeats, tasting the idea. “I like it. The victim-offender.”

  After, their group, such as it is, sits in a green room, offstage, Lana with her leg stretched on a dung-colored couch. Sharpened pencils, a tin of mints, a box of tissues on a low table, all detritus of the desire to communicate in a room of bureaucratic hum. Hogan, ill-fit to someone else’s blue serge suit, twists a button on his wrist.

  “Actually, you were great,” Rose tells Lana and turns to Hogan. “Wasn’t she convincing?”

  “Of course,” says Hogan. “That testimony’s going straight to the governor. But victim-offender or not, election year’s coming up and you don’t know what people will buy.”

  “It’s not about buying,” says Lana at the same time that Rose says: “He’ll buy it.”

  Lana fades out after that, half listening, the others like schoolchildren prattling the alphabet. “You can’t have me be your puppet,” Lana had said to Rose that morning, immediately regretting her harshness. “Don’t worry. I told you I’ll come. I’ll testify.”

  Because most of Lana had been happy to make a choice that morning. Happy to submit to a plan, the subjunctive, some present plinth built on the bedrock of their friendship. To this place she had wanted to skip with Rose and thus rejected the stretcher Rose had gone and arranged.

  “How are you though?” Rose asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Lana kept saying, “I’m here, right?” her leg serviceable enough to walk to Hogan’s truck until the mistake roared in, a thousand needles impaling the shin so that, on the drive, it turned into an electrified stub. She willed herself on, hobbling out into the lawyer’s chamber.

  Now they wait while the lawyer consults with her underage boy clerk, Lana stretching out her stub. The clerk like some concierge ushering them to a grand meal finally emerges. “You are asked to return for
final consultation.”

  Late on this day, seated in the office, Lana has something close to a hallucination. All these people want to pull a prank on her. The clerk is a poorly paid actor, the lawyer a she-devil, the others reveal arcane machinations. Mainly they have brought her here so they can now draw back the window drapes and reveal her father in some dry potent unreality. And yet she must remind herself he could not possibly be free.

  “Given the flickering constitutionality of capital punishment these last twenty years,” the lawyer says now, rifling through her folder, papers falling out, “given the odd state and federal challenges and stays that have made the Mahler case so singular, a test case for the death penalty, shifts that have rendered Miss Fukuji-Mahler’s father an ambiguous menace to society—” and Lana tunes out, back into the chant of he will not be let out, cannot be free. The lawyer finishes by saying that Miss Fukuji-Mahler’s father can only now be treated to the best society can offer him.

  “Which is?” Rose asks.

  “The decency of hospice care.”

  Hospice! The two old friends share a glance, a code between them, given that Rose used to tease Lana if she slept with an older man: “So what, you’re into some new thing, you’re into hospice sex?”

  Hospice sex. Lana had liked the phrase, ringing in her head for years every time she engaged in it.

  Hospice for Vic. Hogan asks some question but Lana has beamed off again, letting them rattle on, peering out one of the windows, arched and Moorish, oddly beautiful, and for the first time in these years, something like empathy tingles Lana: poor Vic has been so long in prison that he has probably forgotten what you do with things like a windowsill or a doorknob. In her wrists she feels the certainty that Vic would stare at a doorknob, unsure how to manipulate it. He would have become a passive defanged Vic whom she would not recognize. The fluorescent light sputters, an orange perfume from the lawyer woman wafts over her, the day ends and still these companions chatter like finches set free.

  In Hogan’s truck on the way back to Hope, Lana sits crunched and uncomfortable between Rose and Hogan, dreamy on the Percocet she had covertly downed in the parking lot, listening while Hogan and Rose discuss heat waves, Santa Ana winds, Ventura fires and the reports that say all fires have been contained. “I did see a burning ember fly into Hope today,” says Hogan, “bark chunk big as a baseball. But we’ll be okay, we did our burns, this is nothing new.”

  If neither seatmate would notice, Lana would pop another pill, speed up the medication schedule just a bit, because the drug fails to muffle the burn inside her leg, alternating between being a zipper and a spear thrust inside, a hot sizzle up the ankle through the knee toward an obscure raid on the groin. Of course it had been a mistake to leave her bed and she should have accepted at least a wheelchair, but she’d rather not ask anyone for a doctor since shouldn’t the ankle have healed already? Or does getting older mean your body becomes yet another traitor? No matter how many men Lana may have slept with or how much she has tried to abandon stewardship of her body, she has never known a bone out of place, broken or twisted, and as Mary had done before her, Lana has never gone for any physical exam she could miss. Since this most recent accident she has been sure that if she did see the doctor, her ankle would worsen, and yes, this is old-style Mary superstition, one Lana can’t help. Vic had always loved to ridicule Mary for having kept her daughter from vaccinations and yet this same medically superstitious Mary had managed to sign, with Vic, a document committing Lana to time in an insane asylum or what they liked to call a sanitarium.

  Still, whether a relic of Mary’s childhood or some Californian faith-healing package, a flickering superstition formed one part of Mary’s bequest to Lana, the wrongness enough to make a person want to cry out. “Now what?” says Lana instead, seeking distraction.

  “Our last tactic.” Rose, answering, seems to believe Lana still wants to talk about Vic.

  “We go full throttle,” Hogan says.

  Lana cannot help her shudder: they act as triumphant as if they have caught an animal in a trap. She is not wholly sure that the animal in this case is not her. “What does full throttle mean?”

  “We ask for the stay for Vic. On compassionate medical grounds,” Rose says.

  Hogan singsongs. “Ask more, you get more.”

  “His lawyer didn’t already ask for a stay?”

  “You weren’t paying attention?” Rose elbows her ribs gently.

  “Ow.” Lana overreacts. “Anyway, they can’t release him, right?” She wishes she could tell them the truth, wormed out through the fissures: Lana wants Vic to stay caged. But what kind of sick girl prefers her father—emerging in that afternoon’s conversation as an aged, defanged lion—kept in a cage?

  Only the talking about Vic had been easy. Everything else about the afternoon had been her own private trial. In the lawyer’s room, just before they had left, Lana had imagined Vic so clearly that, for the first time in years, she could see his eyes dazzling with stupendous light, a blare of love, his face in full accusation calling her traitor to the family Mahler.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:17 A.M.

  The rumble of thunder makes Javier remember to turn off the talk radio he loves so much since today the federal inspectors are rumored to be coming on one of their surprise visits. While listening to the radio on state time is no crime, it does not betoken a prison known for spic and span, its satisfied janitor union and its adherence to regulations, a prison that since its construction at the peak of the boom has not seen a single riot.

  According to Javier’s boss, a good part of this is due to the quality of the guard squad, guards not in the racket for the pension or plump benefits but who bear fealty to the state of California, a republic that has seen fit to provide them and their families with such thoughtful provender.

  Ever since the expansion last year, things have gotten better, although there has been just a bit more pressure to use the new solitary cells that were built. Though Old Parcel would get an additional 55,000 a year for each inmate put into solitary, Javier has been stalwart at keeping certain offenders from the solo box.

  Old Parcel had even received a citation from the governor because in ten years not one of its offenders had committed suicide. The guards are told that the problem with suicide is that while some crazy types may consider it a civil right, suicide rates smear the state’s record, making politicos have to throw billions of dollars at programs and guardrails to prevent self-offing.

  Javier flicks off the radio, examining his thumbnail ridges before reminding himself that he must either book an appointment with the manicurist for Victor Mahler or cut the guy’s nails himself, nails that have turned hoary blue at the end of distended purple fingers on which already creep signs of necrotic rot, a syndrome among all the other syndromes the poor guy has. Vic’s mind might be there much of the time, at least some of the time, but at times of excitement, a fog creeps in from the edges, making Vic argue for ten minutes with Javier over the exact year of his birth, claiming he has been imprisoned for eighty years or that the guard should just let him go downstairs to find his own bedroom. And as such the guard has learned to enter whatever world his charge lives in, whether Javier finds Vic fighting with the Russian army near Cracow or walking bloodied as a small boy away from a wolf cub. Javier turns away from the surveillance camera in order to slide a thread of smoked carp out from his teeth, happy to smell the guards’ coffee percolating down the hall.

  For the tenth time since his shift began, he reads the day’s schedule. Since 4:00 a.m. Javier has had to cover the guard station for a friend. Usually he would have left his condo by seven. In the early morning hours, he’d done the usual checkup on Deisi and had his worst fears confirmed—his daughter had left her princess bed. Who courted her? Was she out flashing her tetas? Worse?

  But up until today she had been so successful at making for herself a no-trouble zone that it is hard to think she is not as she seems, Deisi the sci
ence student bringing home awards, her future charted and assured given that she had always been a sweet kid who asked what and why. For years, a solo parent who had nailed both his general-ed diploma and a certificate in criminal justice on the kitchen wall, still in his heart an eighth-grade dropout, Javier had tried being clever for his Deisi, and when he had not known how to answer her questions, he always said mija, I’m not sure but let’s go to the encyclopaedia until a few years ago when she discovered the computer and stopped asking questions, back around the time when he had noted with proud fear a certain jiggling display during her quinceañera.

  This is what Javier pities Vic for most. The man so obviously lacks both ritual and family. Tonight Javier will take his daughter to her favorite ice cream stand and get her in a roundabout way to speak about what she is doing when not in school. He tries to be a good example, having told Deisi only part of the story of why he had dropped out: his loathing of Father Xavier’s knuckle-raps. Not telling the full story, how he’d taken punishment into his own hands, one day slipping Xavier a laxative that looked like chewing gum, making the old priest spend hours in the lavatory, Xavier gaining from that day the extracanonical name of Father Colon, so that only a year later the poor father retired from the soul-saving of young boys, entering his golden years prematurely. On his ride to work, Javier sometimes spots, like a vision of his own badness, Colon along Five, seated astride a grand pipe-outfitted combo red lawnmower and leaf blower, looking grim while riding over whatever plot of dry land the church had conferred.

  And Javier would be damned before his Deisi would emulate his own example: she would graduate high school, go to college, know the bounty of the state, probably not be a civil servant because she would learn that nothing lay out of ambition’s reach.

  You’ll do better than I did, Javier always tells her. Don’t model any of your choices on mine. You could become a teacher or doctor or anything. And though Deisi’s mother had long ago been a victim of diabetes—her delicate foot cut off, her kidneys ruptured—he’d never since fully courted any lady. Those he did in halfway measure were more for an occasional Saturday-night oil-greasing, a stately dance and escort home, a perfumed peck on the cheek and only rarely a bit more because he prides himself on his dignity, a watermark meaning he has surpassed his father’s tequila rages, all of it stemming from his belief that Deisi’s dead mother stays similarly proud in heaven of how Javier sustains the family, modeling loyalty to memory, a lesson to bless their beautiful normal American daughter whose only flaw so far as Javier can see is that she wears shirts revealing more of her marriageable bounty than he thinks proper.