Charisma Page 4

  Tomorrow he’d be back in Los Angeles. But instead of the twentieth floor of the Marcus Communications towers, he would report to the thirteenth. Instead of one of Marcus’s prestige publications—Webwatch, J.P.G or Quanta—it would be Eyeful, a high-circulation pulp-paper weekly available at quality AM/PM Minimart checkout counters nationwide.

  The twentieth floor was impossibly far away now. It would be the third floor until he found something better.

  He didn’t want to think about it. But there was still life in Claremont. It tingled in the air. There was a story there somewhere. Maybe he could catch one last ride on the golden pony, snag an editor’s eye, earn a few points.

  He closed his mental door on further desperate speculation, and opened his Compaq Presario laptop.

  It was just standard follow-up procedure to research on the Emorys after the trial, to learn that Vivian Emory ran a costume shop. And just happenstance that he’d kept tabs, and noticed when she went on the web, posting pictures of herself in her period costumes. Everything from Marie Antoinette to an Easter bunny. She was exquisite, so damned talented, that even the cheap digital pictures on her web page broke his heart every time.

  And it was just good record-keeping to keep track of her e-mail address.

  Maybe he could dash off a note. Just a way of saying “hi.” Vivian probably wouldn’t remember him, but since he’d passed through her neck of the woods, it would be polite to send greetings. Since he intended to pitch a news story related, however distantly, to the things that had happened to her family, it would only be courtesy.

  It might be neighborly to let her know that someone thought kindly of her. Just in case she was feeling depressed. And maybe needed a friend.

  You’re a scavenger, Renny, and even worse, you’re making a fool of yourself. But even that brief flash of fear didn’t take the silly-assed grin off his face, and there, in the hotel room that smelled of cigarettes and bad coffee, Renny Sand started typing, happier than he had been in weeks.

  3

  Journal entry #302, Aristotle Project. RE: GENERAL BONDING.

  One of the x-factors necessitating a wider test is the influence of the peer group. Most of the research on imprintation and role-model implantation deals with the reactions of single adult subjects. But group dynamics are a separate and powerful factor of their own, and must be accounted for. The test groups, ideally, will be carefully chosen and monitored, balanced for gender, race, and ethnicity, and allowed to evolve like mini-societies. Therefore, in no case will the test grouping consist of fewer than fifteen children …

  Thirteen-year-old Patrick Emory lay in his bed, trying to decide whether to listen to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince’s Pussy Control (a paean to self-control and redirection of sexual energy) or Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E-flat. Not that he would place Prince on the same level as Mozart. There really wasn’t anybody today who functioned at Amadeus’s level. But he would certainly put The Artist on a par with any living composer. Trouble was, Mozart or Beethoven were great if you wanted to study or calm your mind. But if you wanted to boogie, forget it.

  He rolled up and grabbed his art pad. That was easy, because his room was almost obsessively neat. It had the usual load of male teenaged paraphernalia: mattress on the floor, stacks of books and magazines, baseball bats and balls, football and soccer ball, computer disks. Wall posters: Bruce Lee, actor Vin Diesel, publisher Alexander Marcus (one of his idols) and Halle Berry as Storm in X-Men. Everything was neatly in its place, indexed, referenced, instantly available.

  Patrick closed his eyes to remember, then began to draw. The image was simple, untutored, but clear: a boy riding a bumblebee. He’d been watching an old monster movie called Mysterious Island, and some of the imagery had crept into his dreams. He laughed at it, and stuck it into a manila folder already crammed with dream images. Once a month he culled the best, chucked the rest.

  Jeans, T-shirt, socks, shoes.

  Patrick grabbed the Mozart from a rack of cassettes on his wall, popped a tape into his Walkman and slipped the headphones over his ears. He washed his face (managing to do a decent job without removing his ’phones), brushed his teeth, and stepped on the scale: 125 pounds of fighting muscle.

  He said goodbye to his mom, who barely noticed, buried in some last-minute repairs on a Cinderella. He picked his way out through the living room. No easy trick. The entire room was stuffed, from one edge to the other, with potted plants, scraps and remnants of cloth, clothing dummies, hanging vines, books and videos on costumes from around the world and all different eras, windowsill flowers, and a sewing machine that had earned roughly two-thirds of the family income since Patrick was in diapers. Oddly enough, Patrick’s bedroom was actually the cleanest and most organized part of the house.

  Not that his father didn’t work, and work hard—when he could get it. But Otis Emory was hanging on to his job by his teeth. Too many problems, too many missed days, so many arguments and fights he was lucky to get twenty hours a week these days. His dad pushed lumber at the mill: long, grueling, dangerous work. Alternating exhaustion and depression drained his dad so thoroughly that when he visited them, he often had no energy to enjoy himself (although always enough energy to hug his boy, and tease Mom). It was Vivian Emory’s magic fingers that brought comfort and even a touch of elegance into their lives. His most pervasive image of his mother was of her bent over some scrap of cloth as she wrought it artfully into a wood sprite or a Rambo, the old Singer humming busily away for countless hours a week. Sometimes she didn’t go to bed for two nights in a row, until she was raccoon-eyed but satisfied with some set of theatrical frillies. A sign over her disaster of a desk read: Creativity is not a pretty sight.

  His mom, however, was. When he looked at her, he saw only her warm, tired smile, her effortless grace, the rich dark hair, and the loving heart that seemed to express itself in everything she did or said.

  She watched Oprah on a thirteen-inch color screen as she stitched. Her fingers seemed to have eyes of their own. A soft bluesy wail wafted from the radio in the background, Koko Taylor sassily warning women that they needed to watch their friends, not their enemies. Vivian Emory sang along, and listened, and watched, and stitched, lost in a blissful, busy glow all her own.

  Patrick stepped past the sliding glass door onto the wooden deck of the double-wide trailer that was their home. The Claremont paper mill a mile south belched endless clouds of blue-white smoke into the sky. As a consequence, when the wind blew north the air outside went pretty foul. In the trailer it was almost always breathable, but only because Vivian Emory had a magic touch with plants. She kept every inch festooned with vines and little flowering things that made their little corner of the park its own woodsy world.

  His bicycle leaned against the wooden steps leading to the porch. He slid his hands over its chipped green paint, greeting an old friend. There was some part of him that always looked forward to this moment, to the time of day when he could get home from school, or wake up late on a Saturday, and take his bike for a long ride along the River Front Highway beside the Cowlitz. Sometimes he could look down on its sparkling blue ribbon and watch the little fishing boats puttering around. He would wave to the people. Often they waved back. They rode the tide or the wind. He pumped his pedals. Sometimes he raced them and won, and when he did, he felt like he was king of the world.

  They had more money than he did, but they weren’t having any more fun.

  The Riverside trailer park was home. He knew almost everyone on the south end of the park, the good end. It was a neighborhood. Most tenants had occupied their spaces for over a decade. Retired couples, welfare cases, single mothers with three or five kids crammed into two bustling bedrooms, young marrieds barely out of high school. Although some of them were only five or six years older than Patrick, they lived in an entirely different world. Sometimes on weekends the husbands would play football or baseball or soccer with Patrick and his friends. For a while they were all just kids
, but eventually their chubby, sun-haired wives would call them to painting, or shopping, or weeding, and the game would break up.

  It was a good place to live … or it used to be. A safe place, a trick-or-treating without needing a parent or guard dog kind of place. Or had been, once upon a time.

  But Riverside had changed owners three years ago. What passed for the local CCRs had been thrown out the window. Recently, people were renting slots or homes to anyone with first-and-security. As a result, the neighborhood was falling apart.

  Take, for instance, the two big Fleetwood trailers furthest north, with the boarded side windows and unkempt grass. The ones at the L he navigated daily. There was always a motorcycle or two parked out in front, and almost always someone lounging around on one porch or the other. Maybe one of the big men in tight T-shirts, or one of the pale young fleshy women who seemed to belong to no one and everyone. The women ignored him as he wheeled past. A year ago he had come to their front door, trying to sell Christmas cards. A big-bellied unwashed white man had rubbed Patrick’s head, chanting, “Wish I had a watermelon.” The boy had blinked at him, uncomprehending. The man and his friends howled as if that was the funniest thing in the world. Face burning, Patrick retreated, and never approached them again.

  They smelled funny sometimes, too, a smell that sometimes reminded him of insecticide, and sometimes window cleaner or, odder still, a cat box. There was something about them that made his stomach crawl, and Patrick liked almost everyone. The one he liked the least was called Cappy. Cappy Swenson was a huge man, bigger than Dad, the kind of man who made sidewalk crowds part, that decent people instinctively avoided in movie theaters and parks. People gave Cappy elbow room. Cappy sported a wild mat of red beard, and a flat shelf of a face that looked like it had been hammered onto his skull. His eyes were little bright hot marbles, his swollen chest and shoulders disproportionate to his bowed legs. Cappy scared him.

  Cappy had only arrived about six months ago, but the others acted like they had known him for years. When he was around the chaos over at the Fleetwood became a little more organized. He had been away, maybe in jail, and the others were glad to have him home. The first time he saw Patrick, the boy was pretty sure Cappy’d said, “Goddamn, how many jungle bunnies you got hopping around here?”

  Nasty, enthusiastic laughter had followed. Patrick, little legs working frantically, had pedaled the hell out of range.

  Of course, he’d heard language like that before. His mother told him that it used to be fairly common, but not here. Not around here. Claremont was his town, and he loved it.

  He knew every inch of Claremont and its poorer sister, Allantown. In fact, he’d rarely been outside it. To Portland maybe three times, Seattle once. It lay nestled in hills cradling the interstate, a community spiraling outward from the mill that birthed and sustained it. A salt-water inlet snaked in from the Pacific, usually loaded with freighters. Railroad tracks split the town east and west. Passenger cars and box cars trundled north and south through the hills, stopping at the Amtrak station east of the river, and the mill a little further south.

  Patrick remembered when some of the housing developments were just green grass, scrub and trees, but slowly and steadily houses and apartment buildings and offices sprouted everywhere in little clusters, grew together, pushed the green back toward the hills.

  The real estate developers and mill executives lived up in the hills: there were some beautiful homes up there. Patrick had accompanied his mom delivering costumes to a hill party, and had gaped with awe.

  There were middle-class homes for the mill workers who lived over to the southwest: some of those neighborhoods were good, some bad. The difference was often just a street or two. Poorer folks lived over in Allantown, south next to the river, or in the hills north: unincorporated land without city services, folks who hauled their own garbage to the dump once a month in stinking Chevy pickup trucks with battered panels and peeled paint.

  And at every point of the compass were the trailer parks, through which short-timers flowed and old-timers sank their withering roots, and people like Patrick and his family held on, and hoped for better days.

  But in the town between the hills, split by the interstate and the river, Patrick knew every video store and park and used-bookshop, every gas station that provided free air (the Arco on 5th), every bakery that gave free samples (the Dutchman with his incredible doughnuts on Thursdays, Marco’s Marketplace with their little toothpicked squares of pizza on Monday and Wednesday) and of course the bookshops. Not a lot of bookshops, mostly just the big one at the Twin Rivers Mall, and then there was one built into the Inside Edge coffee shop downtown. But there were a lot of secondhand shops, and in some of them you could find interesting stuff.

  He wasn’t thinking about the copy of Huckleberry Finn he had bought last month, or even remembering the warm smile from Rowan Matthews, the seriously retro owner of the Inside Edge, or remembering her saying that Patrick must be such a smart boy to appreciate a book like that.

  Today he was much more interested in just getting to his weekly meeting place. So he went north, out of the trailer park and along the river for two miles, then crossed the road and entered the woods. He had to stand up and stroke with the big muscles in his thighs now. Grit and loose rock ground against his bike tread as he worked his way up the old logging road.

  As he did, he experienced a strange sensation he’d known many times in the past: the illusion that he was standing still, the rest of the world flowing around him. He reveled in the cooling pressure of air against his face, but if he closed his eyes how could he tell whether he was moving, or merely enjoying an afternoon breeze?

  The road jounced against his tires, but he’d been in the motion simulator at the Portland Museum of Arts and Sciences, and it felt much the same way, and he never moved a meter. A strange sensation, that much was certain. In physics they talked about relative frames of motion. His mind probed and poked at that, savoring it like candy. Then he let it float away. The sun was shining, and he was about to see his friends. And sometimes, that was enough.

  A green scrap of cloth fluttered from a three-meter pine sapling on the left. He took the turn, then the first right turn, and pumped his way down a straggly path, until the paved road behind him disappeared. He hopped off the bike, and began to walk it up the mountain. The sun filtered down through a canopy of yellow-green leaves and cedars, alders, and Douglas firs quilting the ground with shadows. Distantly, water trickled, snowmelt runoff rivulets twining into streams that would flow to the Cowlitz and Columbia and eventually the glittering Pacific, thirty-five miles to the west.

  He no longer followed a path, just a shallow rut in the ground. Only a few bent twigs suggested that human beings had ever passed this way. He didn’t need the signs. Even without the ribbon on the tree, he would have known where to turn, could almost have found this spot in his sleep.

  The brush grew heavier, then abruptly opened, and he entered a clearing.

  He could smell the smoke even as he approached, but felt no alarm: spring had been drenching, so the fire hazard was low. And at any rate, he knew that the fire would be banked with stones, that there would be a bucket of water nearby, and that those who had started and maintained it were very cautious indeed. Watchful. That was their nature.

  “Pat!” The tallest of the three kids in the clearing called. His name was Lee Wallace, a distant relation of the former Governor of Alabama, something that caused his parents both pride and embarrassment. Lee was five-ten, with pale hair and about two zillion freckles. He should have been gangly, but instead moved with a strange and almost insectile grace on the soccer field. “Didn’t think you’d make it, man.”

  Lee had only attended the preschool for a year. Then his dad had opened a computerized print shop next to city hall, and they had all moved from Allantown to Claremont. He no longer lived in the neighborhood, but managed to stay in touch with them.

  The shortest of them was Sherma
n Sevujian, Hermie Shermie to the Group, who had once been a little Lebanese butterball. He had always seemed to have a falafel or chunk of gyro sandwich stuck in his mouth. His father managed—and now owned—a sandwich shop over at the mall. A few years ago Patrick was afraid they would have to roll Hermie down the street to school every day. Lately the weight problem had resolved itself: he was biking everywhere instead of begging his mom or his older brother for rides. He played soccer and paid his own way into tae kwon do classes at Trask Matthews’s Master Academy. These days, his mouth was more likely filled by a pear or orange than a Payday bar.

  The last member of their quad was Destiny Valdez. Destiny was cocoa-colored, about five-four, with a trace of her old baby fat still gracing her waist. But that, and all traces of her childhood save her fiendish energy, were vanishing fast. When she wore her long dark hair back, and the light hit her just right, she looked a little like a cross between Jennifer Lopez and Janet Jackson, and that was very fine indeed.

  Her budding breasts and hips did cause Patrick a problem now and then. Things had changed big time since the times out on Claremont Daycare’s activity field. The tomboy still lived in Destiny, but there was something else, too, something that made Patrick feel uneasy. Boys were discovering Destiny, and Destiny had discovered them right back, specifically one tall, muscular ninth grader named Billy “Deep Blue” Kumer. Destiny and Deep Blue held hands, but rumor said that Destiny had never actually kissed him. She said that good Catholic girls didn’t do that, but he suspected that they did, sooner or later, just that with Destiny and Deep Blue it was going to be later, or maybe never at all.

  Not a real kiss, anyway, the kind of kisses that Patrick had seen in movies but never actually tried, the turbocharged ones with wet, open mouths and saxophones wailing in the background. Those spit-swapping marathons were dizzying just to watch. God only knew what it would feel like to actually try one.