Amor and Psycho: Stories (9 page)

Scarface looked incredulous. “Who’d jack a book?” he asked.

At city hall, he walked confidently up to the metal detector, and when it went off, he levitated three feet, turned in midair and bolted. I found him out front, sitting on the rear bumper of a black limousine with embassy plates.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You said they checked you for books.”

“That one’s a metal detector. To check you for guns.”

“Or
knives
,” Scarface said, brandishing his.

We watched together as a beautiful woman walked down the staircase, wearing a long dress of cream-colored satin and carrying a bouquet of roses.

“Bitch looks like an angel,” Scarface said.

We strolled through alleyways in the Mission, observing the iconography of the murals. Scarface peppered me with questions about urban life. When you bought coffee in a restaurant, did you get all the milk and the sugar you wanted? When you bought a house, did it come with electricity? When
you bought life insurance, could you kill yourself? When you bought stocks, like Coke, did you get Coke for free? If one of those johns paid you to lie down, could you get your nut off, too?

I thought, This must be what it is like to have a child. Not that I wanted a child, but it was nice, walking around with a kid asking question after question, expressing curiosity.

In the mosque, we ran into a stampede of empty shoes on the mint green rug. Men prostrated themselves, or leaned up against the walls, or knelt before the Imam, who spoke rapidly in Arabic about moderation, modesty and patience. Scarface and I sat in back with an interpreter, who wore a headset and translated what the Imam said. Men came and went freely, clasping the hands of their brothers as they passed while putting the other hand over their heart—a formal yet intimate gesture.

I joined the women in a separate, closed-off room where we could hear the Imam but not distract or be seen by him. Handwritten flyers pasted to the walls admonished us in English not to whisper during prayers. Nevertheless, the women introduced themselves in whispers. One was an Austrian who had converted; another was Apache from the Southwest. The Apache woman had just converted last Thursday, and she wished everyone in the world the same happiness she had found in Islam. A high school senior said Islam gave her a beautiful privacy. She was not oppressed or forced to choose.

The mural itself was disappointing—the usual romantic imagery: camels. City kids had done it, but everything about the mural spoke to a distant past in the desert.

The mosque served a free lunch—cumin rice and falafel, chopped salad, and baklava. Somebody opened up the soda machine at the front of the mosque and handed out free sodas. Scarface was impressed, and he drank two Cokes.

“I want to be a Muslim,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I like these guys because they scare the white guys.”

“You want to scare people?”

“I already scare people,” Scarface pointed out. “And I know how to pray.”

When we reached the car, somebody had broken the small rear window. The backseat was covered with glass.

“Why did they go in the back window?” I wondered aloud.

“They didn’t want to make too much noise,” Scarface said.

“They didn’t even take the stereo. They only took my fleece jacket—but it had sixty dollars in the pocket.”

“Sixty bucks would be enough,” he said with a tone that indicated I was a snob.

He swept the broken glass into a piece of the cardboard and dumped it carefully down a sewer grate while I taped up the back window with strips of duct tape left over from my marriage, when I’d been prepared for everything. While
Scarface cut tape off the roll with his knife, he noticed a transgender woman in a blue dress and high heels crossing the street. “Jesus, what is that?” he said, grabbing my arm.

“That’s a man who is taking hormones to make him look and feel more like a woman,” I told him.

“I never saw anything like that before,” he said. “I do not approve of that.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Lighten up.”

“You approve of that?” Scarface asked, loudly enough for the transgender woman to hear. I saw, suddenly, what the transperson saw, a big kid, probably with a knife.

“Of course I approve,” I said loudly.

We didn’t speak again until we drove over the bridge and Scarface told me he was carsick. I took a detour to Mount Tam, and we talked and walked up a wide dirt path, higher and higher.

“So can anyone just go to San Francisco?” he asked.

“It’s a free country,” I said.

“Is Los Angeles in America?” Scarface wanted to go there. He wanted to know if it was true that Juvie, where his older brother went, was a town run by Jews.

“No—it stands for juvenile,” I said. “Kids.”

“So where are the Jews?”

“Jews live everywhere. In diaspora.”

“Did somebody take their land?”

“Usually, yeah,” I said.

“That’s exactly what happened to Indians,” said Scarface.
“That’s why I could never be racist against Jews like my mom is.”

“There’s Israel, but it’s small, and other people were living there, too.”

“Do the Jews have an army?”

“In Israel, they have a pretty good one.”

“That’s what I mean, man. Motherfuckers can’t
mess
with their land.”

“Well, and there are all these different tribes of Jews, like Native Americans, and everybody’s mixed up, too, like on the rez. My mother was Jewish; my father wasn’t. My sister isn’t. I am—but I don’t even believe in God.”

“How can you not believe in God? That’s fucked-up! What stops you from doing something bad?”

“You can’t just be a good person because you think God is watching—”

“Sure you can,” Scarface said gently, his voice encouraging.

IF SOMEONE
surgically removed my memories and let me keep one, this might be it—this day—though it was probably a mistake to take him on a four-mile round-trip hike. We started in a black blanket of fog and climbed up a steep grade on a gravelly path toward blue sky. Half a mile up, Scarface was sweating. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be out of shape. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’ve got asthma and bronchitis,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. And I’m obese.”

A couple wearing spandex shorts and shirts rode past us on thousand-dollar bicycles. “This reminds me of the time I climbed Masada,” one of them said.

“Hey, could I have a swig of your water?” Scarface shouted at the bicyclists. The couple pedaled faster.

“I’m just messing witchou!” he yelled after them.

I practically pushed him to the top, but we made it. I wanted this success, I thought, for Scarface. Before he filed for divorce, my ex-husband used to tell me that I always try to extract more from an experience than is there to be withdrawn.

When we reached the top, Scarface wasn’t really able to talk anymore, and by the time we’d hiked two miles back to the car, the sky was dark. I’d planned to get him home at a reasonable hour. His mother wasn’t exactly overprotective, but she was still a mother.

SCARFACE STOPPED WORKING
on the mural. He just stopped coming. I drove out to his house. The little dog still stood barking on the roof of the car, but no one answered when I knocked on the door. Finally, I called Mr. Boyle, the county administrator in charge of the mural project, who read Scarface’s accusation: “ ‘I was the only kid on the field trip. It wasn’t even a field trip. It was just me.’ ”

Mr. Boyle said, “I can’t believe you don’t know even commonsense things—don’t drive the kids alone, for example. Didn’t you read the guidelines?”

“Guidelines for what? What guidelines?” I asked.

“The guidelines on the Web site,” Mr. Boyle said. “The kid was pretty specific. It would be hard to make up the stuff he was saying—a kid like him, on a learning plan, pretty high special needs. It might be impossible to make up.”

“To make up what?”

“The pornographic imagery.”

“What pornographic imagery?”

“Did you climb up a tree to retrieve your undergarments?”

“No—that was his cousin.”

Mr. Boyle said, “Look, it’s not that I have any reason to believe him. It’s that I don’t have any reason to believe you. I’m old. I don’t believe anybody.”

Scarface remained in the mural, though, digging in a hole in the ground, unearthing relics from the past—an old Coke bottle, an arrowhead, a coffee can, a safety razor. New kids joined the project and helped. “Paint what you see,” I told them. “Don’t just paint stuff people tell you is there.”

I even had new favorites, smart, assertive kids—Javier, Alicia, Salvador, Nick—who basically just needed an adult to say their names and mean it.

THEN AUNT BEA DIED
and left me a little money. I took every penny and booked a trip to Africa to visit Carrie
over the spring break. At first, I hardly recognized my sister: She looked like a nun. Her face had the planes and angles of a clenched fist, especially under the white hat she wore. The dry air and exposure to injustice had puckered her like a raisin. She despised America—she was full of good and subtle reasons—though she remained hopeful about the beneficial effects of free-market capitalism on the local economy.

Carrie lived, with a few others like her, in a hut made of sticks and grass. Her hut smelled of the powdery body spray she’s used since she was nine. It smelled of my sister—damp, sweet, childish, chemical. I kept a journal of my impressions, as if I might be responsible for making a mural of the visit. Unfortunately, I made only two entries before I got sick.

In the evening, we sat under Carrie’s mosquito net and drank quinine water mixed with her vodka. Carrie didn’t
want to talk about the girls or the doctor. She wanted to talk about childhood things, especially Uncle Gene. “Did he ever ask if he could kiss you?” Again, she wanted to know. An ammonia scent clung to her, bringing back a vivid memory of what my sister was to me as a small child—a pissy smell, a drag.

“What do you want me to say? Uncle Gene was a lech—yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I said. This line of questioning has always seemed to me beside the point. I hate when people identify their whole lives with their dysfunctional families; I refuse to be defined by mine.

“But you admitted yourself—”

“No, I didn’t. Nothing terrible happened to me.”

“For me, every day is like it just happened,” she said.

“What happened, Carrie?”

“He pressured me. He kissed me and he touched my breast. It went on for years. Nobody wanted to hear it. You know this.”

“What do you want, Carrie? Everyone is dead—Gene, Auntie, our parents.”

“I want you to acknowledge what happened to us.”

“You make it sound like the Holocaust,” I said.

“You minimize it because you liked it,” she said.

We’d said all these words before.

Her face conveyed intense dry rays of heat. “I knew you’d come because you’ve made a mess of your own life,” she said. “But your denial is disgusting and insane.”

I felt dehydrated, sunstruck. This must have been the
illness coming on. A day later, I was chilled and shaking; then for an indefinite time I was just alive instead of dead. Existence became a dim red point of light; when I put my hand over my heart, the light went out. Carrie stood behind a yellow haze, as remote as a figure projected onto a movie screen. I felt no hope at all. But I did not die.

Time moved backward and forward. I asked Carrie for an egg. She laughed bitterly. The U.S.-owned oil giant had promised to create model chicken farms, so that the community could be self-sustaining. But those in the community did not want to take the chicken coop–building workshop. They wanted the oil giant to build the chicken coops. As a result of the impasse, the chickens grew sick and died. The eggs, my sister told me, still lay in their cradles of hay. Did I want one?

The doctor without borders came. He asked Carrie for a cup of tea. From his tone, I understood that the two of them were sleeping together. In a fever, you see things. The day Uncle Gene died, his face appeared to me in a dream.

Carrie slid a bedpan under my hip. “You’re really sick, you know,” she said. She brought a bottle of pills and left it on the table beside my little bed of straw. “You can have them all,” I think she said.

“I can’t take pills,” I told her.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and set a glass of water down on the table so hard that the glass cracked up the side.

Her ministrations continued while I went in and out. She boiled a chicken—head and feathers and all. We sat in a
formal dining room before our mother’s Spode soup plates. My plate contained the whole chicken, the feathers drenched and steaming. Carrie sat at the opposite end of the table, drinking a glass of water.