The pines there came right down to the white sand, a dark fringe. Sitting in the moonlight on the luminous, fine sand, you could look up at that lighted ball with its ancient scuffs and wounds, shining down on the world with all the mysteries of the night, and you could imagine that you actually were up there. Ainley said if he had a good enough telescope he bet he could probably see the lunar module.
But what the nuns did when they caught you out! Tania scrubbed more than her share of toilets. It ended up she liked the job, liked keeping things shining and clean, the porcelain white and antiseptic and the brightwork gleaming. It was their own dirty sensibilities that bestowed an axiomatic unpleasantness upon the chore. But she enjoyed seeing those big tiled rooms come clean to her own satisfaction.
Ainley smoked pot and then lied about it to her. It took her a while to figure out how she felt about it, exactly, but when she finally did, that was the end. She received, from here and there, sad little reports about this waning boy, pining away for her. She imagined him standing beneath her window, like poor dead Michael Furey. By then, though, she’d successfully petitioned her parents to get her away from those crazy Dominicans, and on her first day at Crystal Springs School for Girls, she had gotten her maiden eyeful of Eric Stump.
Nice to be alone in the woods. Tania hasn’t had any time to herself in ages. The birdsong here is intermittent and plaintive. Now she touches the Olmec monkey on its thong around her neck.
He gave me the little stone face one night.
She slips her finger inside the trigger guard and takes aim at a bough high overhead. On second thought, might as well do it right. She mimes: Rack the slide, watch the round coming up the ramp and into the chamber. Feet apart, relaxed, raise the gun to find the target with your dominant eye. That tweety little bird, all innocence, chirping away up there. Align the sights (actually, only one on this toy) and squeeze the trigger.
“Move the gun to your head, not the other way around. And stop breathing.”
Teko has come up behind her and stands, leaning against a tree. He is wearing shorts and a T-shirt that is dark with his sweat. Around his ankles are weights he had Yolanda make, sand sewn into heavy cotton socks.
“How’d you manage to let me sneak up on you anyway? Crashing through these woods, you should have had the drop on me. Lost in the stars, rich girl.”
Suddenly he draws the toy revolver from his waistband. Tania flinches.
“Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. See, you’re dead. I killed you. You fail the test.”
A ridiculous moment, the two of them in the trees, playing with toys. Tania abruptly remembers firing the submachine gun at Mel’s, people flattening themselves against the asphalt, the gun bucking, fighting her as it emptied itself. Teko, meanwhile, had allowed himself to be disarmed. Teko had blown everything. RIP Cin, Zoya, Gabi, Fahizah, Gelina, and Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. Who’d “failed” when it mattered?
“Are those the socks you took from Mel’s?” she asks.
“There are going to be some changes,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Big changes around here. No more sitting around watching fucking brainrot TV No more fucking takeout. No more fucking girl talk and giggles like a fucking slumber fucking party.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“You watch that attitude, bitch. I got my eye on you.”
Tania looks up from a paperback copy of The Exorcist to watch from the screened porch Yolanda and Joan walking together in the tall grass behind the barn. They walk slowly, contemplatively. Joan has her hands behind her back, the fingers of one gripping the opposite wrist. Yolanda gestures deliberately, sculpting a sort of compact box in the air, illustrating the solidity and unassailability of her thoughts, gestures that say, Let’s Be Reasonable. Tania wonders idly what Yolanda is trying to con Joan into doing. A brief wind thrills the surface of the grass, momentarily drowning out the insect drone. Bugs all around here: grasshoppers and praying mantises and endless flies plus cicadas in the trees shrieking out the swan song of their long lives. Why they screened the porch in, probably. Nice in here, cool and with that summer-place smell of dust and must.
Off in the distance she sees Yolanda stoop and pick up a weatherfaded tennis ball. Awkwardly she pitches it into the sea of waving grass, where it disappears. Then she and Joan continue their slow walk. Tania returns to her book, not looking up again until she hears someone climbing the porch steps. Joan opens the screen door and sits on a chaise, sinking slowly into its cushion, which audibly exhales.
“You wouldn’t believe this,” she says. “But what they want me to is dress up like a white. For to go to town.”
Guy Mock’s big idea was that Joan would be available to run errands and such this summer, keeping the lid on the red-hot fugitives. This was a way for her to return the favor he and Randi had done her by smuggling her out of California in 1972, when she herself had been red hot. Randi helped wipe down her apartment, and then Guy drove her to L.A., where together they boarded a New York flight, Joan carrying a huge stuffed rabbit and an Easter basket by way of disguise. Joan sometimes feels as if she’s been continuously returning this favor for two years.
Here it’s been tough duty. An Oriental girl sashaying into the general store, yeah sure, to buy Oscar Mayer baloney and Wonder bread. “Who you think you’re fooling with that stuff, chink?” the clerk had finally asked her. One day she’d gone into the Goodwill just for a look at the paperbacks when she’d sensed another presence in the quiet nook where the books and old National Geographics were piled, and she’d looked up to meet the disapproving gaze of the clerk, who’d come out from behind the counter to follow her.
She said, “We’re closed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Leaving, Joan thought, stupidly, “That’s funny, the sign says open till four, the lights are on, no one else seems to be leaving.” The dawning that the woman had sought to protect her foxed old copies of national best sellers from Joan’s gook depredations came upon her slowly and humiliatingly.
“She says, like, I’m just a little obvious.”
“Duh,” says Tania. “Why don’t they just go themselves?”
“And blow the covers.”
“Their famous cover. Research assistants don’t buy groceries too? And what are you supposed to be, the Oriental houseboy?”
Joan snickers.
“Shit, I’ll go down there myself.”
“Someone is feeling frisky.”
“Just bored around here all the time.”
“Well, whatever else, they heard of you, star chick. Your face is the famous face.”
Tania laughs, softly, and throws down the book, which she finds pretty boring, actually. Girl locked in a room with a bunch of authority figures trying to change her personality? That’s entertainment? Plus every time Father Karras lights up a smoke, she wants one, and she’s trying to cut down.
Tania never smoked at all before she was taken. Now she just can’t stop. At the apartment on Golden Gate, where she first came out of the closet to join the others at their eating, training, schmoozing, fucking, standing guard, and all the other pursuits the nine of them had crammed into those two rooms, she took up the habit in earnest. Everybody smoking away in two sealed rooms with the heavy surveillance drapes over the locked windows. Actually, she began in the closet, accepting cigarettes just to be polite. She remembers Cinque advising her that smoking was like killing pigs. “Baby,” he said, “once you start you just want to do it all the time.” She tilted her head back as subtly as she could manage, trying to peer at her captor from beneath the blindfold she wore.