“Smart girls,” said Jim. “Bad habit. What movie you girls going to? Maybe we’re heading to the same one.”
The white girl began to say the name of the movie, but her friend interrupted her. “You first,” the black girl asked.
“You know, we’re torn,” said Jim. “Torn between that new action movie with the different cities getting blown up, and that romance with the young girl and the older guy falling in love.” He paused. “You girls know about love?”
The girls, still seemingly enjoying the flirtation, let go of the fence. They started walking again, not in a rush, and the white girl looked over her shoulder at the men. “We’re fast learners,” she said. “Maybe next time you could teach us.”
Jim loved it. He said, “Next time it is,” and then asked for their names.
“Allie,” the white girl said after a laugh, clearly lying. “I’m Allie, and this is Caitlyn.” And when they were gone, Jim looked as though they hadn’t left at all. He said, “Are you kidding me?” over and over, socking Phil’s arm. He said, “Which one you like best? I don’t discriminate.” They worked on the buses some more that day, with Jim talking about the girls and Phil talking about the girls, too, both of them wondering aloud what it was they’d do the next time those girls walked along that fence.
* * *
That night was Phil’s turn to patrol the park. He was alone, and the heat of the day had become a frigid, windless cold. He was supposed to walk the paved paths between the trailers from ten o’clock till sunrise. For the job, my uncle had provided Phil and Jim each a flashlight and a two-way radio (one to share between the two of them; the other stayed with Gaspar). Phil knew that Jim, on his nights, would bring along some extra equipment — a gun, namely — but Phil carried only what he’d been given. He knew that most of the criminals in the Antelope Valley were kids, as he’d been, scared off easily enough by a bright light and a holler.
At some time past midnight, he decided to head over to the lot to check up on the buses. Eventually, the space would be used for more trailers. But for now, the new fence was all that separated the place from the park on one side and the uncultivated desert on the other. It used to be that kids would set up a basketball hoop out there. Phil had known the family that owned the hoop, and they’d left a few years back, taking the thing with them. In the time between the basketball and the VWs, the only objects that ended up on the gravel were either dumped and abandoned, or led there by the wind. My uncle didn’t tell Jim and Phil outright, but he was glad to have the VW buses; he liked the idea of the lot being put to some good use.
The buses, all six of them, were parked in a single row. From where he stood, Phil could see the front ends, those big, bubbled headlights, the VW insignias between them. To save the flashlight’s battery, Phil kept the thing off unless he needed it, which meant that the only light on the gravel lot now came from the orange-bulbed arc lamps that lined Avenue I. In that strange, muted glow, the buses looked new. The spots where oxidation had done its job on the paint hid in it, reflecting and absorbing the hazy light just as the more polished areas did. The headlights, all twelve of them, crystallized the light back at Phil in a way that reminded him of the twinkling eyes of cartoon children.
He moved on, working the perimeter of the place, and then inward toward my uncle’s office at the center, and then back outward again. In this way, in layers, he worked the remainder of his shift.
* * *
Sunday, at about the same time as the day before, the girls returned. Phil hadn’t expected them to come back at all, and even Jim was surprised to see them again so soon. He thought, at the very earliest, they’d come back the next Saturday. He said to Phil, “How bad can a girl want it?”
This time, Allie asked the men if she and Caitlyn could get a closer look at what she called the “hippie cars.” Jim let them in through the gate, telling them they could sit behind the wheel of one, if that was something they’d like to try. It turned out that, yes, that’s exactly what they had in mind.
So in went Allie, into the driver’s seat of the yellow one. “Yellow’s my favorite color,” she said more than once. Jim closed the door behind her, and she rolled down the window. With one hand gripping the top of the wheel, she waved her fingers down at Caitlyn, who stood flanked on either side by the owners of the bus. “How do I look?” Allie asked the three of them. Great, they said. They all agreed that the girl looked great.
“Take a picture of me,” Allie said, and Caitlyn slid from her back pocket a thin red camera. Allie posed in various ways. She made certain faces, many of which featured sticking out her tongue. From several angles, Caitlyn snapped pictures. Then she climbed up to the passenger seat and handed the camera, along with instructions, to Phil.
“You girls know how to drive one of these things?” asked Jim.
“Caitlyn can’t drive a bicycle,” Allie said. Her friend disagreed, loudly. The girls found this funny. “But I,” Allie continued, “have my driver’s license.”
“Driver’s permit,” Caitlyn corrected.
“No difference there,” said Jim. “But do you know how to drive a manual transmission? A stick shift?”
“Not really,” Allie said. “Learned on the other kind.”
“Not surprising,” said Jim. He made a joke about putting the “man” in “manual.”
Allie pivoted her body in the driver’s seat to face the men, letting both her arms fall from the open window. With her palms she drummed a soft beat against the door. Phil snapped a picture of her this way. “Teach us,” she said.
Phil slipped the camera into his shirt pocket for safekeeping. He said, “Don’t you girls have fathers for that?”
“Quiet all along and the first thing he says is negative,” Jim said. “Don’t mind him, girls. Of course we could show you what you need to know. Only problem is: None of these dinosaurs are in what we call ‘running condition.’ Good news is, I’ve got a manual transmission in my own vehicle, a working truck, just over there.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trailer park. “What do you say?”
Allie looked to her friend. “Can’t,” she said, turning back to Jim. “Caitlyn has to be home before her mom gets there.”
“And that’s soon?”
“Real soon.”
“Sorry,” Caitlyn said genuinely, as if she’d forgotten Jim’s birthday. As if she’d broken his heart.
And with that one word—“sorry”—the fourteen or fifteen years Phil had pegged for the girl suddenly seemed exceedingly generous. Now that he looked at their faces in the enormousness of the windshield, now that he focused on Allie’s miniature fingers tapping against the side paneling, he was struck by the fact that these girls were children.
Jim didn’t seem to share the epiphany. “Tell you what,” he said. “What are you ladies up to later tonight?”
They drew up a plan for the girls to sneak out of their homes after midnight and come back to the trailer park, where Jim would be the only security guard on duty. Phil said, yeah, maybe he’d show up, that his being there that night was a possibility. In all likelihood, Jim knew Phil wouldn’t join in on the fun, but that didn’t seem to bother him too much. He might’ve looked forward to the time alone with, what were their names? Allie, yeah, and Caitlyn.
* * *
The first thing Phil did when he got home that night was he poured himself a glass of water from the tap. From the freezer he grabbed the only ice tray he owned, which he discovered hadn’t been refilled before being put away. He spilled the water from his glass into the slots of the ice tray and placed that in the freezer. Then he refilled his glass and swallowed the water warm.