Imperfect Birds (18 page)

“To shoot raccoons with?” Rosie asked, and he shoved her.

“I’m going up ahead and see if I can find Evan Andrews,” said Alice. “Wish me luck.” She moved off ahead of them, fast but clumsy, stumbling almost at once. Rosie and Jody smiled at each other. They were both so athletic, while Alice had an adorable clumsiness born of impatience, and not tuning in to her body at all unless there was a guy around.

“I have to be home at midnight, don’t forget,” Rosie called after her. Turning to Claude, she said, “I don’t like raccoons, either. They hiss, and they gnash their teeth, and they sneak in through the cat door to steal my cat’s food.”

The lights of the party campsite grew brighter, and soon they stepped out at the bottom of a hillside that went upward and onward forever. A girl Rosie didn’t recognize stopped them, to give them their bracelets and cups. You got to pick out what color bracelet you wanted. Jody and Claude picked magenta, which was light pink until they snapped each other’s on and the bracelets began to glow darker. Rosie studied the box of bands, light pink, blue, green, yellow. “The blue one is really pretty,” said the girl, “not fluorescent like the others. Blue blue. Tahoe blue,” and it was.

The three of them walked up the shaggy dry grass of the corridor to where most people were gathered, where the generator sat. The space was perfect, an endless dark refuge extending the length of a football field up the hill, with lights plugged into the generator that also powered the boom box, and everyone glowed with a bracelet. They could see people leaning against the eucalyptus, bay, and oak, perched on top of boulders and rocks, sitting with their backs against logs, like it was all furniture. The stretch of grass was pretty clear of things to trip over in case you got loaded, no rocks to tumble over or brush to get tangled in. The people giving the party had found a great spot and were going to make a bundle tonight.

They stood around getting their bearings, moving to the music, making small talk. Then a guy Jody knew from rehab passed Rosie a pipe, and held a lighter to its bowl as she inhaled. She held it as long as she could, exhaled, and took a second hit. “Be careful,” he warned. Moments later, she was bombed, totally toasted.

Rosie turned away from Claude and Jody because they were shaking their heads and smiling about how wasted she looked. They couldn’t smoke at all. She was actually tripping lightly, merging with the crowd, dozens of her peers, all on the same plane. She walked to a group of kids by a cluster of oak trees.

“Hey, who’s there?” she asked in the dark, and then their faces materialized, as two people called out hi to her, friends from school. She leaned against a tree, let it hold her up. “I am so wasted,” she said, laughing.

One of the three blondes from the night before stepped forward, and they hugged.

“Be careful. Someone here is selling sherms,” the girl said—joints laced with angel dust.

“I’m fucked up, but I don’t think it was dust.” Rosie started laughing with pure joy, at the long stretch of the woods that embraced her, the tree trunk that held her up, the twinkling stars above, the whole fucking beautiful diamond universe, above her, below her, around her, inside her. This was the Truth, the capital-T truth, even when you weren’t stoned. It’s what Einstein proved—that it was all energy, and it was all One.

She hugged everyone in the group, her new best friends, and then someone else came up to see who they were. First you heard the crunch of leaves, the rustly, scuttly sound of the dry oak leaves. No one could sneak up on you. Every time someone entered the meadow, you heard their shoes crunching on the fire road, and heard them greeted by the girl with the glow-stick bracelets and cups. It was like having a sound map of the new world.

She wandered off to see who else was here. Each time the drill was the same—“Hey, who’s there,” then faces materializing in the dark, hugs, or introductions, then hugs for the new best friends. Whatever she had smoked had given her bright and dreamy hallucinations, and they took her to a soft, gentle place where she wanted to hold the whole world like Mother Teresa with an AIDS baby, and weep at its beauty.

After several plastic cups of beer, she ended up dancing for a long time, sometimes with boys, sometimes with girls. She should think about starting back. Everyone was getting pretty loaded. Several girls had thrown up in the chaparral, one boy was having a loud sobbing nervous breakdown about what a misfit he was. His friends surrounded and comforted him. The hillside smelled more like eucalyptus than the fire road had, which was closer to the flowers in people’s gardens. The bay smelled like your father slapping aftershave onto his cheeks, but you didn’t have to have hair in the sink, all the slapping sounds, or the father.

She climbed up the hillside, squinted into a group of ten or so kids. “Who’s there?” she asked, and was soon reconnecting with friends from school. They had washed out an empty milk carton and filled it with beer so they wouldn’t have to return to the hub so often. It was great, but after another cup, Rosie needed to sit. She plopped down onto the grass, clumsy as Alice, laughing at her efforts. Others sat down with her, and filled her cup. Everyone loved her, she could tell by their faces lit by glow sticks in the moonlight.

And then she heard cars down below, several at once, not like when the shuttle came by from Safeway, and then kids were shouting and screaming. Rosie and her new crowd gaped at each other, as people in nearby crowds leapt to their feet. “It’s the cops, it’s the cops!” various people shouted in the night, and then there were cops shouting, “Stay where you are! Stay put!” Everyone was swearing, scrambling, streaming down the hillside to breaks in the brush on either side of the trailhead. It sounded like they were having fun, a mob moving as one.

Rosie and her friends scrambled farther up the hill, trying to avoid the police flashlights. There had to be five cops at least, shining their flashlights, grabbing at the nearest kids, but some kids ran past them and out of their grips like greased pigs. The cops caught a couple at a time, and led them off to the fire road where their cars were, and came back for more, but mostly the kids outmatched them and got away. Everyone in Rosie’s group hung together, standing behind trees, holding their breath, peering down. Now a lot of kids were falling and rolling down the hill like an avalanche, like logs or little kids, laughing and screaming when they hit against rocks and branches, twenty of them rolling below where Rosie stood, all the way down the hill.

It was a movie, a crazy strobe-lit movie gone bad, and no one in Rosie’s group dared to move. The kids below who had gotten hurt stopped where they were and called out for others to help them, but only more cop cars arrived, and police poured into the corridor. “Shit fucking hell, if my parents find out,” someone whispered. The boys Rosie was with took off for the higher area, trying to tug the girls, who were rooted in the pandemonium and shouting. They let go and took off when a woman in uniform stepped out from behind a redwood trunk.

“Stay where you are,” she said to the girls, cold as the moon, and reached out a black-gloved hand for Rosie’s wrist, extinguishing the light of the glowing blue band.

E
lizabeth lunged for the phone in the dark, but James got to it first. When she tried and failed to grab it from his hands, she clenched her fists at her chest like a child praying.

“Yes?” he said. She turned on her lamp and watched his face. He was digging his fingers into his scalp, and she was relieved to see anger, not grief. “She’s fine,” he told her.

“What is it, for God’s sake?”

James listened on the phone a moment, before turning to her. “The police busted her and a few kids at a party in the hills behind Manor, where there was alcohol. They’ve got her at the station.” Elizabeth climbed out of bed, clutching her chest. “We can go get her, or they will take her up to juvenile detention for the night.”

“I can be there in ten minutes.”

But James shook his head. She grabbed for the phone. He ducked, dodging her.

“Has she been drinking? . . . Just beer, are you sure?” He nodded to Elizabeth. “And what about drugs? . . . Okay. . . . Yeah, I
bet
she’s mad. She’ll get over it.” He threw his free hand up with general frustration. Elizabeth looked around frantically for her shoes. “Can we leave her there for the night? . . . Why not? . . . I see, I see. Of course.” Elizabeth pulled on a shirt. “What’s the very longest we could leave her with you at the station before you had to take her to juvie? I seriously do not want to make this easy for her.” James listened. “I mean, what if it took us five or six hours to get there?” After a minute, he said, “I cannot begin to thank you. You must be a parent.” He looked at his watch. “Fantastic. Six it is.”

Elizabeth turned on James the instant he put the phone down. “She’d just been drinking beer, so what—she’s seventeen! It was the last of the big summer parties! For Chrissakes!” This is what Elizabeth’s mother used to say whenever she was drunk or annoyed. Hearing her own voice repeating these words silenced Elizabeth briefly. Shaken with anxiety, she did not know what to think or feel besides doubt and worry and questioning of her every move as a mother. Then she plunged on. “She’s such a good kid—and you’re going to leave her in jail?”

“She’s not in jail. And we’ve found rolling papers. Pipes from our friendly neighborhood smoke shop. And you found pills in her pocket after Jody’s party.”

Elizabeth pinched her arm as hard as she could, and it hurt like hell. But she had to be dreaming. How had they gone from Rosie hoisting tennis trophies above her head at the net to Rosie under arrest, or whatever she was under?

“This is a lucky break for us, Elizabeth. It’s so important that we really see what’s going on,” James said. Elizabeth ground her teeth to keep from slapping him; even though she knew he was right, she hated him for it. He went on, seemingly impressed by his own calm and insights. “A, that when you’re dealing with an alcoholic or addict, you’re already outnumbered. And B, it’s revealing what we’re about to dig up in her room. Because the cops aren’t supposed to keep her there just so we can teach her a lesson—but they’re going to. Come on, baby—we can go through her stuff while they watch her for us. We can find out what’s true.”

The room was relatively tidy, compared with, say, Jody’s, which looked like an explosion at the flea-market jeans hut: twisted jean corpses, incense, used plates and bowls, plastic smoothie bottles. But because Rosie’s was not so bad, it took a while to break the code; to discover the resiny smell of dope at the bottom of a box; to find among all her books the two hollowed-out volumes holding papers and a plastic cigar tube of bud; to locate the Cuban cigar box with a false bottom beneath which were flecks of weed, razor blades, three lavender-pink tablets that Elizabeth recognized as Percocet from James’s first gum surgery, and eight hundred dollars in cash.

“It’s the money that she’s made this summer,” Elizabeth said defensively.

James nodded nicely and said, “Okay.”

“For Chrissakes, James, she’s worked nearly every day at Sixth Day Prez, or teaching tennis.”

“Hm,” said James, “good point.”

Elizabeth blew up for the second time. “Don’t you dare use that Al-Anon crap against me. ‘Uh-huh. Okay. Good point.’ I hate it when you do that.”

“What do you want me to say, baby? We just found a razor blade in Rosie’s shit. Do you remember what you and I used razor blades for?”

“Not very often. That’s my point! She’s experimenting.”

James looked exasperated, furious at her for not seeing things his way. “Experimenting means you try something two or three times. More than that is ‘using.’ ” James found a pint of rum in Rosie’s tennis racket carrying case, where the can of balls was supposed to be, and a festive four-pack of vodka lemonade at the bottom of her laundry hamper. “Jesus Christ,” Elizabeth said in despair, as the pile of booty mounted on Rosie’s neatly made bed: Zig-Zag rolling papers, a roach clip, lighters. “What next? Glue?”

She began to cry. “This is going to be good in the long run,” James said. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall by Rosie’s door. “There are all sorts of people locally who help kids and families in trouble with drugs. Anthony, for instance.”

“Jesus, you make it sound like
Panic in Needle Park.
It’s weed.” James rolled his eyes. “Okay, weed and pills. And one razor blade.” Elizabeth almost managed a smile. “This does not make her a drug addict.” James nodded sagely.

She screamed into the air between them, then buried her face in the bedspread and kept bellowing until she felt better. James got to his feet. “I’m going to go make us some mint tea.” She sat breathing deeply with her eyes closed when he left. The stuff on the bed was like the display at the museum at San Quentin, of shivs and syringes made out of pens and toothbrushes. Elizabeth laid her head in her hands and rocked.