Kids These Days (11 page)

She was two months away from sixteen—two months from the open road and the endless dream of a better tomorrow, her few belongings tied into a bandanna and slung over her shoulder, Huck Finn driving a yellow muscle car, smoking a pack of Winstons, wearing a tutu. And as for me? I was twenty-some weeks away from my daughter's arrival on the planet. I could feel the pressing weight of how little time that was. What I wanted to do was hand a spiral notebook and a pencil into the back seat and ask Delton to jot down, longhand, everything she knew: Should we make the BOJ take piano lessons? Gymnastics? When does a kid go to sleepover camp for the first time? When was the first time you remember being actually happy to play by yourself in your room? Or in the yard? If we had one kid, did we have to have two? Was that some kind of rule? Just write it all down, please, I wanted to tell her. All of it. Write down everything I'm going to need to know.

Mid turned at a driveway, pulled up to a little gray clapboard house. It was tiny, fifty or sixty years old. The houses on either side were not—they were behemoths, the products of bulldozings of places like the gray house. The house on the left had its own pool, covered in a clear geodesic dome. The one on the right had marble railings on the upstairs balconies. The gray house had rusting gutters, a cracked storm door. It gave the impression it was leaning. There was an inflatable kiddie pool in the lawn. “Damn,” Delton said, once we were out of the car.

For the first time, I saw her fingernails were painted lime green. “Nice fingernails,” I said.

She looked down at her hands. She had rings on both thumbs. “It's supposed to be how far you'll go,” she said.

“How far?” I said.

“Yeah. All the girls do it. Like, stuff you'll do. Sex stuff.”

“Really?” I said.

“I mean, some girls do that, I guess. Or I heard they do at other schools. We don't.”

“What's green mean?” I said, pretty sure I didn't want the answer.

“Green means green,” she said. “Green means that's what I had.”

“Good,” I said.

Mid rang the front bell. Nobody answered. We could hear people out back, though, and that's where we found the party, or what was left of it: Kids not vastly older than Delton sprawled over lawn chairs, dining room chairs, stuffed armchairs that looked reclaimed from the side of the road. Almost everyone was up on a wooden deck that hung off the back of the house. There was music going. A few guys had a TV set up on a card table. They were playing a video game. Hockey. “I don't know about this,” Mid said.

We hadn't brought anything except for the ice cream that was melting in the car. I was about to ask Mid how we might go about getting a beer, maybe a soda for Delton, when a huge brown dog barreled out the open kitchen door. The dog was a hundred pounds, easy. It was a small bear. A skinny kid wearing shorts and no shirt came running after it, yelling “Roscoe! Roscoe!” The dog never slowed down. It ran across the deck, down the steps, and out onto the beach. “Roscoe!” the kid yelled. “Goddamnit, dude, come back!”

Delton already had her shoes off. “Hey,” she said. “Do you need help?”

The kid turned around. “Come on!” he shouted, and took off again. Delton handed Mid her shoes, hesitated for maybe a beat or two, and then she was down the stairs and gone, too, hollering out
Roscoe!
on her way over the dunes.

Mid stared into the space where she'd been. He sat down on the stairs, fit Delton's flip-flops together front to back. He said, “Holy hell.”

“Should we go after them?” I said.

“They're gone.”

“We could catch up.”

He shook his head. “We couldn't. That's the thing.”

I said, “You don't think—”

He'd let his chin fall down to his chest. “It's a beach. It only has two directions. She'll be alright.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he said. “But what's the alternative?”

Panic, I thought. Choppers with searchlights. I sat down next to him. We were the oldest people there by fifteen years, maybe twenty. One of the hockey gamers scored and celebrated. Inside the house, it sounded like somebody fell down. There was a lot of laughing.

Mid said, “I've got to be honest with you—I'm not really sure I know what to do right here.”

“About Delton?”

“About too much of anything, if you want to get right down to it.”

I wanted Alice. She was better at these kinds of moments than I was. I said, “How do you mean?” because I at least knew I was supposed to ask.

“Carolyn keeps telling me I'm crazy,” he said. “I think she means it.”

Music. Cars out on A1A. Sound of the waves just down the steps. I said, “And?”

“And what?”

I figured, go ahead and find out. “And are you?” I said.

“Let's call her,” he said. “You can ask.”

“You don't seem crazy,” I said.

“Have you seen our house? It turns out I built our house at the Alligator Farm.”

“At the what?”

“It's a place up in St. Augustine. Like a zoo. Or a theme park. They have alligators.”

“You guys are near that?”

“No, but Carolyn's just waiting to find one in our pool. That's the first thing she does in the morning—make coffee, check out the window to see if we've got gators in the shallow end. That's all she wants. To have an alligator come out of the woods, take a swim. Then she'd have it on me airtight.”

I said, “I thought she liked it out there. The house and everything.”

“That was back when we thought we'd get the school built. When we thought somebody might actually build out there with us.”

“No takers?”

“We live in a demonstration home.”

“Somebody'll buy out there, right?”

It was like I hadn't even asked the question. “Hurley went ahead and broke ground at Devil's Backbone,” he said. “And you saw those things. That place is a train wreck.” He picked at a nailhead pushing up out of the deck. “You know why he really wants to do it? The vacation thing is bullshit. He needs to wash money off from this black-market saffron thing he's got going. He grows fucking crocus in a greenhouse on some island out in the river. Crocus. He's got like three or four migrants who spend all day long dusting those fuckers with Q-tips. It's some special variety, not approved for import, and he sells it to a guy he's got in Vegas who turns it around and sells to private restaurants. He's making a fortune.”

“What's your part in it?”

“I'm hooked into him from a while back. He cleaned something up for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's nothing dangerous. Just some paperwork.”

“If he's trying to hide money, what does he need yours for?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Maybe I do,” I said.

He ignored that, too. “The Twice-the-Ices come in this week,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow. I don't know, Walter. I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to pay for all this.”

“You don't have the cash?”

“I need to move some things around.”

I said, “I can give you that check back if you need it.”

“The thirty thousand? Shit. I owe a hundred alone on the Pelican land in September. Plus sixty-five for the Twice-the-Ices, plus monthlies thereafter. And Hurley thinks he wants a deep-water dock once he gets the first run of cabins in. It is possible, my friend, that I may be relatively screwed.” He looked up at the sky. “And here's something for you to chew over later with your little family. This is the pièce de résistance. The nom de plume. The guy who called tonight? Steve? The grow lights?”

It was too fast, all of it. Black-market spices. Whatever the hell else he was telling me. I wanted to stop him right there, walk away, never know anything more. I could pack Alice and the BOJ and all the canned food thirty thousand would buy onto a sailboat and just hope for breeze, hope for the best. Instead, I said, “Yeah?”

“Last Friday? When I went to Daytona?”

“Right.”

“It was to have lunch with these agents. I didn't tell you. It wouldn't have helped anything to tell you.”

I said, “Agents?”

“It was the whole package—two dudes in a Crown Vic, gray suits, sunglasses, all of it. They kept calling me sir. It was wild. Anyway, they were wanting to know if I could maybe get a little more involved over at Island. If I could perhaps provide them with some useful information, was how they put it.”

“What are you talking about? Who were they?”

“Some kind of revenue task force. Special Agents Johnson and Smith. I said they had to be kidding me. They said they in fact did not.”

“I'm not following,” I said.

“They seem to have me on tax evasion,” he said.

“What kind?”

“The evasive kind. The real kind. Only it's not so much evasion, I keep telling them, as a sort of unfortunate series of mistakes.”

“The same guys who arrested you want you to become some kind of informant.”

“No. The county arrested us. The regular police. These guys are different. They're trying to cash in after the fact. My name popped up on their screen, or on a new screen, and now they want to lean on me, and here we are.”

It wasn't real. It couldn't be. I said, “Does Carolyn know?”

“She does not.”

“So the thing with the phone call—”

“I'm supposed to say yes, let Steve move his stuff in, give these gentlemen a call at their special number. I lied to you and Alice back there. I'm sorry. I just couldn't have her, you know, going over to Carolyn—”

“She knows nothing?”

He said, “The whole thing's batshit, OK? Completely. I'm not surprised she thinks I'm losing it. But it's not just me. It's not just the cops. It's bigger than that. It's the house, the girls, all of it.” He lay down on his back, his hands over his face. “We don't talk so much anymore, Carolyn and me. And you know why?” He looked at me through his fingers. “There's no time, is why. Because eventually it's just all carpools and science fair and tae kwon do. Somebody always needs a new pair of shorts in a specific color. And now, with Olivia, it's her goddamn phone beeping and ringing off the hook, without end.”

“Mid—”

“She's got college tours in the fall. Somehow she wants to look at Georgetown. She has a Hoyas sweatshirt she got from some boy, wears that thing around the house.” He was getting louder. “Georgetown! And then you go to the grocery store, where all you want is a fucking pint of ice cream, because your fucking wife has asked you to step away from the operation for a few days, and what you get is a community theater pirate trying to cup your daughter's ass in the meat department. I mean, what are you gonna do?”

“I don't know,” I said, which was the truth.

“You're goddamned right you don't know. Nobody ever knows. And all these people who think they're special, who think they've got it cracked? Fuck them all the way to Sunday.” He popped his knuckles. “You should have seen these guys. The agents. Badges. Everything. They wanted to know if I would wear a wire.”

“A wire,” I said.

“Like in the movies,” he said. “Like in the shitty movies with the guy trying to make things right.”

I lay down, too, not even trying to take it all in anymore. “You have to tell her,” I said. “Carolyn.”

“I know that,” he said. “You don't have to tell me that.”

Something was blinking up above us in all the stars. A satellite, maybe, watching us—two old guys at a party we had no business being at, Delton a half-mile away chasing a shirtless boy and a dog named Roscoe, Mid confessing the whole wrecked catalog of his life to me. I felt dizzy. I said, “I thought you said it was the dream.”

“What's that?”

“Kids,” I said. “The dream. That's what you said the other night.”

“It is,” he said. “But sometimes it's everything else, too.”

“I thought you had it all neat and organized,” I said. “You and Carolyn.”

“Surprise,” he said.

“I can't get my head around it. The kid.”

“Don't tell Alice that,” he said.

“Too late.”

“Then you're fucked,” he said. “Join the crowd.”

“Great.”

“Just be happy you're not me.”

I said, “Are you going to jail? Is that what this is?”

“I'm trying to work on that,” he said. “
That's
what this is.”

Delton came back up the steps before I had a chance to ask him anything else, to find out if I'd still have a job in the morning, or in a week. To ask him all over again if he was crazy, and mean it this time. Delton was out of breath. She leaned over, hands on her knees. When she came up for air, she said, “You guys have to come right now. The turtles. You have to come see the turtles.”