Out at Night (12 page)

The door to an appliance store burst open; looters poured out with HDTV’s, price tags dangling, and scattered into the street. Grace thought again of the miniature bourbon she’d left on Jeanne’s ink table.

She switched the channel.

Vonda stood in front of the jail, supported under each elbow by her friends. In their fruit and vegetable costumes, they looked like a Fruit of the Loom chorus line.

The reporter had big hair and a tiny body that made her look like a lacquered bobble-head doll. She lobbed three questions at Vonda, pointed ones about her father as an FBI special agent. Each time Vonda stole a quick look at Andrea. Waiting for a nod, eye blink, a glance back before answering. Andrea was the leader. Vonda followed.

The reporter beamed at Vonda as if they were old friends, her lips so glossy they looked sticky. Behind her glided a cameraman.

“Channel Three received a letter today from Radical Damage, saying that it’s planned something special for the last night of the convention, and the question on all of our minds is, what are they going to do?”

Andrea slid a look at Vonda and Sarah. “What makes you think we should know?”

“Are you part of Radical Damage?”

Andrea’s lip curled. “You think I’d tell you?”

A knock on the door interrupted Grace’s concentration and she sprang to her feet, heart hammering. The door handle jiggled. She crept closer.

“Grace?”

“Goddamn it. Uncle Pete, you scared the hell out of me.” She undid the bolt and held open the door.

Her uncle stood in a pair of jeans and a rumpled sweatshirt, holding a pizza carton.

He looked past her toward the television. “Oh, good. I see you already got the movie on.” He squeezed past her and sat on the edge of the bed, adjusting the sound.

Grace relocked the door.

“I have ten minutes, tops,” he said. “Eat fast.”

There was a small love seat next to the bed and Grace sat there. She reached for a piece of pizza. On television was an expanded version of what Grace had already heard: abnormal cells in the small intestines of rats, stomach lesions from genetically modified tomatoes, pigs that had given birth to stillborn piglets, sheep with black spots on their livers.

Pete ate neatly through three pieces of pepperoni pizza, eyes on the screen. Grace stalled out after half a piece. He turned off the television and stood up.

“Boy, I’m going to have some heartburn tonight.” He refolded the cardboard lid into the box. “What did Vonda tell you?”

“Let’s start with this.” Grace threw away the crust and wiped her hands. She didn’t look at him. “What did you tell Child Protective Services about my mother?”

She heard a swift intake of breath. She turned. A muscle in his right eyelid twitched. He smoothed the grease away from the carton lid, wiped his hand on a crumpled napkin.

“Aunt Chel was worried. We both were. We’d get calls from collection agencies, school truancy officers, up and down the coast.”

Her heart was starting to trip. She felt the way she did the first day at every new school, angry, hyper-alert, ready. The way prisoners felt transferred to a new facility, knowing it was going to get ugly, that it would always be ugly.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not for me.”

She was twelve years old, it was her third school that year. She was standing in 7th--grade science class, making a model of a cell. She’d just double-bagged the Ziploc baggies and poured Karo syrup into the baggie to represent the cell membrane and the cytoplasm.

Ricky Mellen was her lab partner and she could smell a faint whiff of boy sweat and something she later identified as aftershave. Ricky reeked of the stuff. He held the baggies open wide as she carefully poured.

His hair stood up in a stiff gel cut that looked like freshly mown grass. At the last second, he cracked her up by sneak-eating Gummi Worms and three chocolate-covered peanuts, part of the stash that had been set aside to represent the various organelles inside a cell. He was telling her that overcrowding of organelles was a serious problem, especially among the amino acids and mitochondria.

He had no idea what he was talking about and mispronounced everything; Grace had read the book cover to cover at the motel they were staying at; but he was cute and she realized in a tentative, heart-stopping way that he was—flirting. With her.

Grace, the new kid with no prospects who had to lie about where she spent the night. He offered her a Gummi bear and she took it.

And then the door opened and Mrs. Caltriter from the office, who always wore pink, poked her head in, with the saddest smile on her face. Behind her stood a woman Grace didn’t recognize. And her brother, Andy. He was crying.

Grace dropped the baggie and ran. “Is it Mom? Is it my mom?” Her voice was high and choked. Heads craned, the class turned, grew silent.

“This is Mrs. Altheria, Grace.” Mrs. Caltriter’s voice was clear and it carried across the smeary lab counters, across the playground, probably up to Mars and back, and certainly carried into the deepest reaches of Grace’s heart.

“She’s from Child Protective Services. She’s here to help.”

If Grace had to rank an order of badness, she’d be hard-pressed.

There was getting separated from Andy for a while. The foster home where the kid in the bed above hers wet the bed every night. Being yanked out of school. Being returned to the same school. Having Ricky look right through her, embarrassed. Missing her birthday. Sitting alone at lunch. Sitting alone on the bus. Sitting alone at recess. In class. After class. The corrosive shame of being different, having no one.

Being a tribe of one.

And then her mother at the window of the home one night. The whispered hurried conference through the screen. Grace going to school and melting into the shadows, waiting in the blistering heat as her mother’s rickety car screamed to a stop and the door flew open.

Good times.

Mac thought she was good at leaving. She came by it honestly. It was one of the genuine gifts of her childhood.

Her uncle seemed inordinately interested in the pizza carton lid. “We didn’t make that call.”

Grace felt light-headed, looking at him carefully for any sign that he was lying. The skin on her face felt rubbed raw, as if she’d been crying a long time. “You didn’t call Child Protective about my mom.”

She needed to hear clearly what he was saying. There was too much noise in her head. He looked at the carpet. Nodded.

“But you did talk to them when they called you.”

He was silent.

Her voice was on the edge of shaking. “You think you can walk on this one? Skate? This twisted me in ways I don’t even know yet.”

Her uncle sighed.

“Who got them involved?”

He shook his head.

“Who called CPS, Uncle Pete?”

He flicked his eyes at her and she could see in them a darkness, and something else, a truth. “This is going to sound nuts, Grace, but I think it was your dad.”

The blood rushed from her head and she sat.

“Grace?”

“My father washed overboard.” Her voice was careful. There was a thread loose in the bedspread. She reached over and tugged on it.

Pete nodded. “You asked. I answered. My turn.”

“Not so fast.”

“Grace.” His voice was gentle. “I have theories about what happened to him and sometime we can talk about that, but right now, I need your help.”

She smoothed the thread out, careful not to rip it. Never knew what you’d tear loose, if you ripped it.

She looked into midspace.
Daddy Daddy Daddy
.

“What did you learn?”

She allowed herself one bright memory of her dad, his face, the merry dark eyes and wide smile, a memory of sitting on his lap and how he smelled of the sea. She put that memory carefully away, so that all the corners were crisp.

She could compartmentalize as good as any guy. There was no girl her equal when it came to closing doors, moving on. She’d take that out later. She’d spend a long time on that later. But for now, she’d rather have her arm twisted behind her back and her knees buckled and her mouth packed with sand—the way it had happened once—before she let on how much she needed to know what her uncle knew about her dad. About what happened to him.

“Andrea thinks you’re targeting her for Bartholomew’s murder.”

“Good. That’s good, she’s on the defensive. She’s talking to you.”

“Screaming, mostly.” Grace told him about following Andrea to the restaurant and the fight between her and Nate. Andrea telling everybody to get a gun.

“Nate flipped out when I brought up bomb making. I’d just thrown it out there to bait her, but he jumped all over it.”

Pete processed that. He looked exhausted and in need of a shave.

“Who is this Nate guy?”

“Nate Malosky. Andrea’s husband. For all their radicalism, they got married a couple years’ back in a Unitarian church. Nate is Bartholomew’s teaching assistant. Or was.”

“Might be interesting to see if he benefits at school from this sad, sad death.” She cut a look at him. “Vonda’s too pregnant to be involved in any of this.”

“Think I haven’t said that? So has her husband.”

“About Stu. He’s not Portuguese.”

“You noticed.”

“Hard not to. I would have thought after the shit you gave my dad. . .”

“Life’s funny that way. It whaps you up the side of the face with whatever prejudice you thought you were entitled to.”

“Karma’s alive and living under the Portuguese flag. How’s Nana with it?”

“She pretends she doesn’t see him.”

“Going to be harder not to see him when they’ve got a kid. Plus he’s what? Thirteen years older than she is?”

Her uncle looked tired. “Nana called him shopworn when she saw him. That sealed the deal. Two weeks later, Vonda ran off with him. He doesn’t have a sheet.”

“You checked.”

“She’s my only daughter, Grace. Of course I checked.”

His eyes scanned the room and settled on the small refrigerator. He walked over and returned with two Diet Pepsis. She felt immediate irritation.

“Need a Pepsi, Uncle Pete? Because if you do, there’s a diet one in the fridge. Help yourself.”

He ignored her. “When Andrea told everybody to get a gun, then what?”

“She said torching the field was just the beginning.”

He cracked open a Diet Pepsi and drained half the can. “The field. She didn’t slip up and say fields.”

Grace thought about it and shook her head.

“Oh, and in jail, it was creepy. She made it sound like Bartholomew was a martyr. Made me think, maybe he was killed by one of his own, to jump-start things.”

Pete looked at her approvingly. Warmth flushed up her chest, the heady glow that came when a piece clicked into place. Uncle Pete might be parsimonious when it came to doling out information, but if she dogged it hard enough, he’d fill in the blanks.

“Aren’t you supposed to call me Cricket?”

“It’s Grasshopper, and we don’t have time. In the last two hours, it’s escalated. Pathologists have found soybean rust in some of the GM fields.”

He said it evenly, with no emotion.

“It kills things, Grace, big-time. It’s been making its way north and west since it was discovered in the states in 2004, but before now, the farthest west it’s been was Nebraska.”

“And now it’s here.”

He nodded. “Its pattern is weird. It’s only hit the genetically modified soy fields grown for this convention, the fields along Highway 10.”

“So chances are, somebody stepped out of a car, did whatever they do with soybean…”

“Rust,” her uncle supplied. “They’d dab spores on leaves.”

“And then got back into their car for an easy getaway.”

“The USDA’s climbing all over it. Trying to figure out the boundaries—stop it from spreading.”

“How does it spread?”

“Wind, mostly.”

Grace thought of the windmills churning as she rode the gusts down a hill and started the slow descent into Palm Springs. “Lovely.”

“Oh, that’s just the beginning, Grace. Our major trade countries are threatening an embargo to prevent infected soy from coming into their countries. We’re going to have to spray every soy field west of here, clearly an impossibility, so you get the magnitude of this problem. If we can’t get a handle on this, we’re going to have bigger trouble than even the subprime crashing.”

“It’s just a couple of fields, Uncle Pete.”

“For now. When you’re talking about messing with the food supply, you’re talking about things going south fast.”

He shifted the pizza carton to his hip and scratched the stubble on his cheek with his other hand.

“There was this wheat fungus on seeds, about ten years back, not too many seeds, not too bad a fungus, and a bunch of countries turned our wheat back at their ports, wouldn’t let the wheat in. Cost the U.S. about—oh, roughly, five hundred million dollars before people felt safe eating sandwiches again. It’s huge. Everything’s connected. Take a guess what the export value of shipping our soy to China is.”

He cracked open the carton and lifted out another piece of pizza. The cheese had congealed to the box and he scraped it up and folded it onto the slice.

“Close to a billion dollars, Grace. Just China.”

He tore a chunk off and chewed, his jaws grinding.

“E. coli. Samonella.” He took a long drink from his can. “Remember what happened with spinach? And tomatoes? Nobody would eat them for months. Way past the time when they got a clean bill of health. And rice. Remember how there was a run on it? Shortages, panic, prices doubling per bag. Well, I got a news flash for you. Soy’s in everything. Sauces, cake mixes, chicken coating, motor oil—probably the cardboard box this pizza came in.”

He took another bite and swallowed it almost whole.

“So how does Bartholomew’s death factor into all this? He was a history professor, not a biologist.”

“Yeah, he taught history from the point of view of the ones on the bottom. It was an angry class, taught to a bunch of entitled kids with too much time on their hands. We’re teaching a whole nation to feel bad about the things that made us strong, made us who we are.”