The Subprimes (3 page)

“Mom, can we get a dog when we get our new house?” he asked.

THE TRAFFIC SLOWED COMING OUT
of Mountain Pass. There was nothing on either side of the road but washed-out scrubland and dry canyon, yet Jeb had to keep tapping the brakes to slow down until finally the line of cars came to a halt, moving ahead just a car length at a time. Coming back toward them were more battered SUVs, filled with families with sad, angry expressions. A few were parked on the side of the road, men and women talking in small huddles.

The front passenger window on the Flex was broken, so Jeb rolled down the rear passenger window and shouted to a man wearing a backward Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim cap, “What's going on?”

“They're not letting anyone with California plates cross into Nevada if you can't show a confirmation e-mail from a Vegas hotel or have a credit score over 650.”

“Credit score?”

“They're running your credit right there.”

Jeb shook his head. Cars were turning out of the lane, making U-turns and heading back into California. He was about twenty
cars from a police roadblock—four squad cars, a half-dozen officers, and a black command post that had been pulled out by a semi-tractor.

The police were checking IDs and then running licenses through handheld devices, checking credit scores.

“What are we gonna do?” asked Bailey.

Jeb pulled forward slowly. “What
can
we do?”

Sargam had turned her bike around and was now at Jeb's window, facing the other way. She flipped up her visor.

“I don't have any ID,” she said.

Jeb and Bailey nodded.

“They're checking credit. I never heard of that before,” Jeb said. “I guess they don't want Californians in Nevada. Don't want subprimes in all those houses.”

Sargam pursed her lips, weighing her options. “I can't cross here. I'm going to find a back road in, take my bike down a trail if I have to.”

“You do what you gotta do. We understand.”

“You head back down to Mountain Pass, toward Barstow, find a cat road and see if you can back-door it into Nevada. Here.” Sargam handed over another twenty dollars.

“We can't take this,” Bailey said.

“Take it. You need it more than me. There's four of you.”

“God bless you,” Jeb said.

“Not God. It's just people. People helping people. That's all we got.”

There were a few car lengths open ahead of Jeb. The traffic behind him was honking impatiently.

Sargam smiled at the young girl and little boy, then flipped down her visor.

She popped the bike into gear and was gone, a blur of white growing distant in the early-evening gray light.

THE BOY WATCHED HER GO.
Again, he thought. Again. We make a friend. And then they're gone. And you never see them again, and that's because we don't have the Internet anymore, and how can you find someone without that?

You can't, the boy thought. Sargam was gone.

G
EMMA HAD NOT DRIVEN TO
the Hamptons in years. Everyone she knew flew the HeliJitney. Still, apparently, there were enough service workers, locals, subprimes, and out-of-season tourists that the Montauk Highway was bumper-to-bumper once she exited the Sunrise Highway. Dusk was slipping; in a few minutes the light would pull back, leaving them in the passing headlight wash and the LCD dash displays. The girls watched their movie, the most recent iteration of the
Frozen
saga, on fold-down screens while the Range Rover idled forward. No wonder no one drove out to the Hamptons anymore, the trip had become impossible, a six-hour ordeal that took them through suburban and exurban wasteland—off-ramp America—Wendy's, Subways, Taco Bells, and cell towers as far as she could see. Only the plutocrats and their hoarding of acreage and local development ordinances had kept the Hamptons somewhat green—otherwise it would have
been private airstrips right on the dunes. As it was, the roadside had been denuded of native dogwood and poplar, those species driven out by the hardier, invasive Kamchatka pine, which not only withstood aggressive pine beetles but actually thrived as it hosted them. The symmetrical, white-trunked, and spiney-needled trees proliferated, the Christmas-tree shape identical from sapling to full-grown tree—the prolific species took just eighteen months to grow to full forty-foot height. Their sap was particularly pungent, a turpentine-like odor that had been the subject of numerous comments on local websites. The K-pines were everywhere, a monoculture that was ruining the glens and dales of all but the wealthiest of plutocrats who could afford private botanists to introduce genetically modified strangler vines that could fight the K-pine invasion but then went on their own ecosystem rampage, driving out native vines and bushes. You missed these details when you flew.

The girls hadn't realized how odd it was to take the car to the Hamptons. They still had not fully recognized their reduced circumstances. Former necessities such as the HeliJitney, or, for that matter, the house on Nearer Lane, even the brownstone on Eighty-first—these were all slipping away, or had already slipped. Gemma had decided early on that she could either look at her girls and feel pity, or look at them as the reason she needed to be strong—and she forced herself to act the latter despite the truth of the former. They would suffer, more perhaps than Gemma, who had herself come from modest means and could, if she had to, return to them.

But the girls had only been wealthy; for them, this would be traumatic, and maybe that was why she had never sat down and had a talk with them about what they would and would not be doing going forward. When she had tallied up how much they spent in an average week—excluding tuition, books, uniforms,
activity fees, security fees, athletic fees, and, the most inscrutable of all, hall fees—it was $2,100 per week on dance lessons (hip-hop, jazz, and ballet), piano lessons, math tutor, gymnastics, art, French, dressage, and cotillion. Per kid.

And there was the longer-term tragedy, the fact that they might never be able to escape from this life but would have to fend with the rest of those who had been left behind. She and the girls could never afford a sanctuary.

She would let them down gradually, she decided, as the school year ended, after which dance and gymnastics would simply not be renewed. She would tell the girls they were going to spend more time together, more family time. There would be fewer of everything, lessons, outfits, horses, dinners out, just, well, everything. But they would be fine, Gemma kept reassuring herself, they would be—

What was that?

They had turned off the Montauk Highway onto Nearer Lane after the sun had sunk, leaving only a faint residue of light. As she took the big elbow right along the ocean, she saw what seemed like some kind of giant podlike structure built right on the sand, in clear violation of all local ordinances, even if this was Padma Cohen's estate. Nobody can build a large, black-gray building right on the beach.

“Mommy, look—a whale,” Ginny said from behind her.

And that was what it was, Gemma realized, a beached whale. Enormous. Flat-headed, gawking-eyed, battleship-gray flesh mottled and ribbed, almost grinning mouth swung open, tail bobbing in the shallow tide. It looked nothing like Melville's monster, more like a huge wind sock in a gentle breeze, alive. A reflective shine from her headlights bounced from its nose, if that's what you called the front of the beast.

“We have to help it,” said Franny.

What they had to do, Gemma well knew, was clear out the beach house so they could rent it. Get the Range Rover cleaned so they could sell it. But they couldn't just leave this whale. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it yet. In season there would have been a crowd around it, of course: TV crews and jiggle-bellied billionaires snapping cell-phone photos and T-shirt hawkers already monetizing the incident. But now?

Gemma scanned the beach. Nobody.

What could they do?

She slowed down and pulled over, yanking the brake handle and then sitting for a moment. She dialed 911.

“East Hampton PD. Would you like premium or standard emergency services?”

“I need to report a whale.”

“Ma'am, you've dialed 911. Premium or regular?”

“Um, I'm reporting an emergency.”

“I take it you want standard. Please hold.”

She had to wait three minutes until finally she heard, “Is this a police or fire emergency?”

“It's a whale. It's on the beach.”

“On the beach? Is anyone injured? Is there a fire or medical or rescue emergency?”

“It's off Nearer Lane, about, oh, two houses from the inlet.”

The operator said, “Hold on while I connect you to a lifeguard.”

“A lifeguard?”

“Do you have any other suggestions?”

“Can you send an officer?” she asked, but the line was already ringing and soon connected to a voice-mail message saying there was no one to take the call but if this was an emergency she should hang up and dial 911.

“We have to help it,” Ginny and Franny were insisting.

“How?” Gemma asked, before realizing her daughters were unlikely to know aquatic mammal resuscitation.

She removed a flashlight from the glove compartment, opened the door, and stepped out, unlocking her daughters' doors and helping them out. The girls argued briefly over who should hold the light before deciding they would switch every thirty seconds.

She left her headlights on and they walked in the bright field until they crossed the narrow bridge over the channel connecting the ocean to the shallow swamp inlet. They made their way down the public access path that Padma Cohen had been trying to have closed down for years, the sand tracking into their shoes. It was dark, the only illumination the half-moon, the Rover's headlights, and the flashlight. She walked gingerly along the path, her girls behind her, hand in hand in hand.

They reached the beach and removed their shoes. From an animal that big, Gemma found herself anticipating ear-trembling decibelage, a moist elephantine harrumph, or a Chewbacca-like moaning, but there was silence. Next to the crashing of the waves and the sizzle of breakwater receding over sand, there was a noticeable absence of noise coming from the beast. As they approached, this breathtaking silence shut down the girls' chatter about whether this was a sperm or pilot whale. They crossed the channel, the freezing water making them gasp and Gemma clinging tightly to the girls as they waded in up to their knees.

Gemma stopped about twenty feet from the beast. It was even larger than it had seemed from a distance, its weight and bulk now giving it a dimension that she had not felt from the road. She shined her light against the gray, bumpy, divoted side of the beast. About halfway down, the flesh was rougher, the ridges and bumps more pronounced, barnacles clinging to the skin until five feet above the sand, where they vanished. There, blubber eddied in cellulite-like patches
as the flesh rose and then curved gradually out of sight, like the fuselage of an airplane. She could see where there were chunks taken out, healed wounds from a life spent at sea.

There was a smell, like ocean and seaweed and fish and kelp and sweat and meat and rot and blood and feces and dirt, an odor both obscene and attractive, like sniffing your genitals.

Ginny grabbed the flashlight and ran toward the animal, walking alongside and moving the oval of light up along the beast until she came to the eye.

They all gasped.

It was the size of a grapefruit, and black, with thick, catenary lids on top and below. Then it blinked. Once. A reaction to the light, apparently.

So it was definitely alive.

“Mom, can we keep it?” Ginny shouted.

Gemma saw flashing lights coming up Nearer Lane and a squad car parking after the bridge over the channel, then two illuminated cones of light emerging and bobbing over the sand, coming closer to the whale, Gemma, and the girls.

“Holy shit,” said one of the police officers.

He shined a light on Gemma, then on the kids. “Excuse us, ma'am, didn't see you and the girls.”

He turned his beam back on the whale and walked around the animal. “Wow. I've never seen anything like this.”

“It's alive,” Franny told them.

“It is?” the officer said. “How do you know?”

“It blinked.”

“Here, look.” Franny took the light from Ginny and walked over to the eye, directing the beam against it. Another blink.

“Holy shit!” said the officer.

In the dark, with their gray uniforms, it was hard to distinguish the officers from the whale, especially as they walked up
close to it. But Gemma could locate them by the squawks and beeps their radios were making.

“Unit 6, Unit 6, what's your signal?”

“Unit 6, copy, uh, we have a 10-something. Signal—I don't know what this is. We need someone out here who knows what to do with a whale.”

“Unit 6, ten-nine?”

“A whale, okay? I don't know the code for that.”

“A whale?”

“Yeah.”

“Like Orca?”

“Copy.”

“What's the forty?”

“At 617 Nearer Lane, on the beach in front.”

“Jesus. Right on the beach?”

“Copy.”

“Well, we'll try to find a vet, like an expert.”

“Tell him: He's gonna need a bigger boat.”

“Ten-nine?”

“Nothing, a joke.”

“Copy, over.”

The officers walked back to where Gemma and the girls were standing in their light sweatshirts. Gemma was worried the girls would catch cold in the early-evening chill; their legs were exposed.

“Damn, that's a big fish,” said one of the officers, who Gemma could now see was an Asian man with a dark mustache.

“Maybe they can just push it back in,” said the other officer, a taller Caucasian. “Get a bulldozer or something and shove it.”

“You can't do that,” Ginny said. “It came here because it's sick. That's what we learned at school. They beach themselves because they are sick, or they're confused.”

“From summer,” Franny said.

“What?” Gemma said.

“From sonar,” Franny corrected herself. “The sonar from the navy gets them confused.”

Within a few minutes, a black, tubular aircraft appeared overhead, a news drone of some kind, shining a harsh, white spotlight on the whale, then on Gemma and the girls, and soon a few more headlights were making their way down Nearer Lane. Local reporters monitoring police-band radios wanted to be the first on the ground.

Gemma grabbed the girls. “Let's go, girls, the police will be able to handle this.”

“We can't just leave,” Franny said. “What about the whale?”

“Well, what are
we
going to do—”

“Holy shit!” both officers shouted almost at once. The drone's searchlight had swung out to the waves, where it illuminated a black mass that was bobbing there, a vast, undulating dark wall rising from the shallow water, its shape apparent by the black absence of stars and clouds. It was a second whale, heading onshore, seemingly riding the tiny breakers in an attempt to beach itself.

Gemma grabbed the girls and pulled them up the beach, behind the first whale. She wanted to run but Ginny and Franny held her hands. They had both started crying.

“Why is this happening?” Ginny said.

For some reason, one of the cops, the Asian, ran down toward the water and began waving his arms, as if the whale were a truck attempting to park illegally. With the next set of waves, the Leviathan bobbed up for an instant and then lunged forward, wiggling once against the sand, making the sound of boots on gravel. The cop turned around and ran away from the water, stumbling and falling into the sand and then scrambling on all fours to get away from the whale.

It felt like an invasion, Gemma thought, an army of monsters storming the beach. The second one was not as large as the first but shared the same flattish front end, the rough skin halfway down. The tide must have gone out since the first whale beached itself because the second whale stopped about half a body length from the first.

Coming from up the beach Gemma could hear the shouts of more folks running down toward them. The white spotlight now caught parts of both whales at the edge of its illuminated circle.

“We're going to have to cordon off the area,” the Asian cop said, standing up and brushing sand from his trouser legs.

“What do they want?” Gemma asked.

The cop looked at her. “Who knows what a fish is thinking.”

“They're not fish,” Franny and Ginny both said simultaneously. “They're mammals.”

A small crowd had gathered, reporters, more cops, a few housekeepers who had come out to see what was causing the commotion, and even the occasional owner out for an off-season weekend.

“Gemma?” a familiar woman's voice called out to her.