The Subprimes (9 page)

It was a powerful message. His grandfather never took the platform again.

HE HIMSELF WAS NOT WEALTHY.
But his Church had prospered. There were the television stations, the books, the stadium-cum-church, purchased from the city of Irvine for $180 million and refurbished for another $150 million. There were the action figures and religious trinkets and devotional bathmats and bracelets and hoodies and even panties. He was the CEO of a multibillion-dollar nonprofit corporation, giving counsel to the wealthiest and most powerful of American business and political leaders, who came to Pastor Roger when they had their occasional doubts about their policies or strategies. The climate, they sometimes observed,
did
seem a little, you know,
off-kilter
, like too cold in the summer, hot in the winter, all these fires. Miami flooding, New York City flooding, Santa Monica flooding. And those whales! What the heck did the pastor make of that?

His job was to reassure them. This is God's will. The Earth, and all its resources, are but tools for men.

In his darkened studio a CNN host was asking what he made of Whalemageddon, those dozen or so whales on an East Hampton beach?

“The great beasts are serving man,” Pastor Roger intoned, “are giving themselves over to us so that we may better exploit the resources of the sea.”

“Moving on,” a blond anchorette jumped in, “we hear that you are working with Arthur Mack? He flew down yesterday to seek your counsel?”

“I'm personally involved in the Arthur Mack case. I spoke with the district attorney up there in New York and told him that I would vouch for Mr. Mack and that I was offering him spiritual guidance. He is a lost soul. And he has sinned against his family. But let's separate his failings as a family man from his career as an entrepreneur and pioneer in the carbon credit derivative swap business.”

“He is accused of defrauding his investors.”

“Every entrepreneur I know has made a few mistakes,” Pastor Roger said. “I am working to reconcile Mr. Mack with his family. To reconnect him with his faith so that he might be reborn. We owe our businessmen second chances.”

“Indeed. All the ladies in the studio are gaga over Mr. Mack.”

PASTOR ROGER STILL WROTE HIS
sermons in a low-ceilinged office above his garage. He lived in a humble, five-thousand-square-foot house in Southlake, Texas, his home a fifth the size of the neighboring houses, both of which he also owned. He retired back to Southlake in the middle of most weekdays to write his sermons and it was here that Arthur Mack was
summoned after his fitful sleep. There were two older ladies seated on a sofa, both dressed in skirt-and-jacket suits with gold brooches on their chests. They seemed to be sisters; both had the same widow's peak and brown-going-gray hair. They nodded simultaneously when they were introduced to Arthur Mack.

“This is Dottie and Dorrie Pepper,” Pastor Roger said.

Arthur greeted them. He associated their names with a large privately held energy concern. Among the businesses they owned: Pepper Carbon, Sunrise Energy, Pepper Petroleum, Potash Corp., Pepper Equipment, Olmstead Petroleum, Birch Towels, Burlington Fabrics, Pepper Minerals, Swanson Foods, Barker Fibers, Columbia Coal & Energy, HG Extraction, Pepper Extraction, Pepper Bank, and Ortho Chemicals.

“We see the world much as you do,” Dorrie said. “We believe that entrepreneurs and job creators, such as yourself, and ourselves, should be unencumbered by the deviltry of regulation.”

“We see you as another John Brown,” said Pastor Roger.

“The singer?” asked Arthur Mack, confused at why Pastor Roger was equating him with a black soul vocalist.

“The abolitionist,” Pastor Roger said. “You must stand up for the cause of liberty, freedom, freedom to trade, to invest, just as John Brown sought freedom for slaves to trade and invest. The history of mankind is the long journey to the free market. The arc of history bends toward free trade. The market is the expression of God, the invisible hand is his hand, God's hand, directing our affairs. To exclude any man from that market is to keep him in bondage.”

“Amen,” said both women.

Arthur had taken a seat in a wooden chair next to Pastor Roger's desk. The pastor sat facing him, leaning forward. “Pray with us,” he urged Arthur.

The pastor was already on his knees, his eyes closed. Cautiously, Arthur got down on his knees as well. The pastor's hands were offered, palms upward, and Arthur looked down at them, unsure, before extending his own hands, palms down, and joining them to Pastor Roger's. The two sisters walked over and kneeled, laying their hands atop Arthur's.

“Are you twins?” Arthur asked.

“Ssshh.”

“Our Father, dear Lord Jesus Christ, provide us with the strength so that Arthur might fight the forces of repression and regulation and socialism and progressivism who would seek to usurp God's will by cutting off the invisible hand. He will need strength as he goes forth, to stand up to the evil of regulation, to those who would ask that men submit to a power other than their maker. Our Father, make Arthur Mack pure so that he may be fortified in this crusade, bring him together with his family, with his children, with his wife, so that he may live in God's blessed holy union.”

Arthur opened his eyes and studied the pastor. He was trembling slightly as he prayed, mouthing the words through thin, pink lips and orange skin.

“We pray now for clarity of purpose, so that Arthur may hold his vision steady and focus on the needs and successes of his fellow entrepreneurs. We pray for wisdom to guide others to abundance, and that the abundance will surround us and be available for the taking, and that we may be shameless and unapologetic upon its receipt, for we deserve abundance. We pray to carry forth these convictions during the battle of business and communications and media. For all of these things we pray, for Arthur Mack is an entrepreneur, that holiest of God's warriors.”

Pastor Roger rose and gazed into Arthur Mack's eyes. He stared for an uncomfortably long time and then sat back in his wooden desk chair.

“Arthur, do you understand why you are here?” asked Dottie Pepper.

“Because I'm like James Brown?”

“
John
Brown.”

“Right, John Brown.”

“Because we patriots, entrepreneurs, good men and women, want nothing less than energy independence for our nation. We believe fiercely in the free market, as you do too, and we don't believe a man should be persecuted for seeking to create jobs, bestow abundance, and enrich his fellow capitalists. That's what you were doing, correct?”

“I was trading C3DS3s.”

“Yes, you were, a righteous expression of the invisible hand.”

“Though I didn't invest so well. I got in a little over my—”

“Arthur, Arthur, we take the long view here. Perhaps the invisible hand had not yet pointed to you, there is nothing illegal about that.”

“That's what I thought. I was going to make it all back.”

“Sure you were, Arthur, that's why we can't have the courts and the media and the regulators and those heathen bands of Eskimos up in Alaska getting their fur knickers in a twist over your case, your investments, because these instruments are important, they allow great men and great companies to take greater risks, risks that must be taken if America is going to continue to prosper. So you need to go back to New York, recommit to your wife, your children, and then we will do all we can to rehabilitate you and get your case dismissed. And that starts with you coming to the platform on Sunday and
turning your will and your life over to the care of Jesus Christ our Savior.”

“And you'll get me off?”

Pastor Roger put his hands together in prayer. “With God's will, yes.”

ARTHUR MACK WATCHED PASTOR ROGER'S
sermon from a seat near the platform. The choir started up and the Grammy-award-winning recording artist Faith Hill came onstage and sang “It's All God” as 72,000 congregants stood and began swaying. The acres of LED signage were now scrolling brands and logos and advertisements for upcoming television shows and new mobile phone models and two-for-one Bacon Tuesdays at Ruby Tuesdays. Pastor Roger thanked his sponsors and then welcomed Arthur to the Freedom Prairie Church, telling his flock that Arthur Mack was a new congregant and to give him a warm Freedom Prairie welcome. “He's an entrepreneur, doing God's will, and was on his way to discovering God's vision for him when the regulators and the progressives—and the liberal media—decided they needed to take him down a few notches.”

There was a chorus of boos at the mention of the usual suspects, and then cheers when Arthur stood up and waved. Those seated around Arthur back-slapped him and gave him hugs, assuring him that he had come to the right place. Pastor Roger welcomed another singer to the stage, and the great host stood up to sway to the singing of “Come Just As You Are,” and when the great host swayed with the gospel singers, Arthur swayed as well, and when the baskets were passed down the rows, he even would have given, had he any money to give. When the sermon was over, the songs sung, and the money tithed, Arthur realized
he didn't know where to go. He sat for a while as the congregants drifted out, huge smiles on their faces as they exchanged encompassing hugs.

After the vast stadium was draining of congregants on their way to pick up their children at Captain's Club (“brought to you by Pepper Extraction”), the 15,000-capacity facility for those believers under thirteen, Steve Shopper came out from behind the platform, where roadies were wrapping cables and wires and putting microphones in boxes.

“Mr. Mack, how did you enjoy our service?”

“Quite a show,” said Arthur.

“Ms. Faith Hill!” Steve Shopper said. “Herself. Few entertainers turn down the pastor.”

Arthur shrugged.

“We have a car waiting, to get you to a flight to Los Angeles. Your wife and lovely daughters, we understand, are now in L.A.”

“That's where she's from.”

“Rebuild the trust in your marriage, Arthur. That is Pastor Roger's fondest wish for you. Seize your beautiful life. You met the Peppers, they are among the many godly entrepreneurs who are interested in your case and know that you did nothing wrong. Now go forth and seize that big life.”

THEY HAD BOOKED ARTHUR INTO
Upright Class for the flight to L.A., a cushioned backseat and two armrests but no actual seat. They did not even offer drinks in Upright, which meant Arthur still had not had that cocktail he'd been craving since leaving New York.

Somehow, his abysmal trading landed him a place in Freedom Prairie Church and the attention of the most powerful pastor
and some of the wealthiest conservatives in America. He wasn't sure why they were so interested in his trading of C3DS3s, but even he could follow the logic of Pastor Roger believing fiercely in the free market, and his supporters in the oil, gas, and fracking industries all believing fervently in their rights to pollute, and their rights to trade those rights to pollute, so as to reduce their costs and liabilities. The Arthur Macks of the world, in their worldview, were as instrumental to the process of exploitation of our God-given resources as were the boreholes and fracture pumps above a great field of shale.

Now, Arthur thought, if he could just get a goddamn drink, then he might have a shot at figuring out a way to exploit all this to his own advantage. After all, who was better at working complicated angles and figuring out this kind of super-complicated stuff and then profiting from it than Arthur Mack, his one recent six-year-long series of setbacks notwithstanding?

I
TOLD YOU THAT ARTHUR MACK
was a dodgy fellow,” said Gemma's mother, Doreen, as she salt-and-peppered a pot roast before setting it into a Dutch oven filled with onions, carrots, and potatoes.

“Okay, Mom,” Gemma said.

“Oh, he was easy on the eyes, and handsome enough in his kind of sleazy, car-salesman way, but I told you: Don't trust him.”

Doreen took a drag on her Menthol 100 and set the pot in the preheated oven. It was an old GE range with four coiled electric burners on top, a broken analog clock set between the Bakelite knobs, and the enamel chipped off from so many years of gravy stains removed with steel wool. The bottle of J&B was already on the counter, the glass waiting by the sink. From a plastic tray in the freezer she removed a handful of half-moon ice slivers and tossed them into the glass. The whiskey pouring over it made a reassuring crackle, and then Doreen turned to her daughter.

“Goodness, that was rude of me. You want one, darling? Have a drink with me.”

“I'll fix one myself.”

Gemma retraced her mother's steps and soon the two were drinking in the tiny tiled kitchen, one window facing west, the other north over a two-basin sink—and no appliance dating from after Reagan's second term.

“Here's to your escape,” Doreen said, raising her glass.

“It's not an escape, it's a . . . break,” Gemma said. “Mom, I've been reluctant to ask, but, could you not smoke in the house when the girls are here?”

A clenched look came over Doreen's face, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses, her lips pursing, but just as quickly it vanished and she nodded. “Okay, okay, for the girls.”

“But you can finish that one,” Gemma said.

“I intend to.”

GEMMA WAS BACK IN HER
adolescent bedroom, the same narrow single bed, wheezy piano, and tall, dark oak hutch that Gemma always thought looked like it belonged in a kitchen rather than a bedroom. The carpet had been changed, thank heaven, and her old clothes had been thrown away or boxed up in the garage, but there were still a few vestiges of her teenage self. The bottom half of a Duran Duran sticker and the remains of a Tecate bumper sticker were still on the inside of the closet door, along with a taped-up school photo of her best friend, Holly Duba. The view out the window, through the upward-thrusting branches of a pomegranate tree, was reassuring. Even the feel of the mattress was right, the smell of the sheets and pillowcase familiar in the way that only home can be.

The girls were sleeping in her brother's old bedroom, sharing
his queen-size bed. They were excited by this change in routine, their leaving school in the middle of the term, the flight to L.A. to visit Gammer, but they were discomfited by undiscussed issues. Did their father know they were going to Santa Monica? And where exactly was Dad? And why were they renting out their beach house and moving to a smaller apartment?

“And why,” the girls asked one morning, “was Dad on a business trip when he was also in jail? And now he's in Texas. Is that a business trip too?”

Gemma set down her coffee.

Doreen smiled and cocked her head at Gemma. “Yeah, Mom, explain that.”

“Who, why, um, where did you hear that?” Gemma managed to ask.

“Mom, we can read.”

“And watch TV,” Franny said. “Dad was trading something, and they weren't real, so he got in trouble.”

“Your father may have broken some rules. Like in a game? So they need to figure out which rules exactly he broke, and then they're going to have to punish him for that.”

“But he's in Texas,” Ginny said.

“Yes, he is, for a while, but he has to go back to New York.” As soon as she said this she realized it was a mistake.

“But we're not there!”

“Well, he's not there now either. He's on this . . . this business trip right now.”

She wondered if the girls had picked up any clue that he had been out on bail and was staying with his mistress's family, and that he never even tried to contact them.

It was Doreen who had alerted her to the fact that her husband was now being portrayed as a capitalist hero for losing millions of dollars of his friends' money. Even Doreen, an Arizonan
with a libertarian streak, found that idea preposterous. “Maybe he's too dumb to know what he was doing, but that doesn't mean it's not cheating. And to think I almost mortgaged the place to invest with him,” she told Gemma.

“We miss Daddy,” the girls said. “Don't you?”

Gemma nodded. “Of course you miss him. Of course you do.”

WITHOUT UPDATING HER KIK-TOK STATUS
or calling a soul, somehow her old high school friends knew that Gemma was back in town. Instead of being furious with her mother for letting out the news, she was grateful for the distraction of a few playdates for the girls. She agreed to meet up only with those of her old friends who had kids of similar age to her own, and who lived within a ten-mile radius of her mom's house. They were lucky Gammer had held on to the place, a generous ranch house on a winding canyon road up from the ocean. So many of her friends' parents had sold out, and she was shocked when she found her former high school pal Sharon living in a mobile home in one of the trailer parks at the base of a cliff above the Pacific Coast Highway.

Gemma drove her mom's old Camry, inching along the PCH, past the oil platforms offshore that she would never get used to, turning off the road in surprise when the GPS ordered her into the old Palisades Bowl. She wound around until she came to Terrace Drive and then pulled up beside a tan-and-brown double-wide.

They sat on the porch, drinking canned iced tea, and Sharon told her how she ended up there, in a trailer, her son and daughter sharing a room the size of a refrigerator box.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Sharon said. “Divorced, a run of bad luck, crapload of debt. My credit shot. But I've kept out of
credit rehab, kept my kids. But, damn, school is short now. They go at ten, back by two thirty. The school year ends May first, Gemma. May first! Can you imagine the hell we would have raised with four-and-a-half-month-long summers? But the kids have to stay real close. Coyotes everywhere.”

Gemma hated feeling like a snob, but the surroundings, the urchin-like appearance of Sharon's children, was a shock. The trailer had siding rusted through in patches, narrow slot windows with frayed curtains, wallpaper peeling in strips, shag carpet worn to the baseboards in places. The kitchen sink was piled with dishes, clothes stuffed into garbage bags, all evidence of too many people living in too little space. And the son and daughter, Damon and Dahlia, had something almost feral about them. They were restless, pent up there in a trailer park, their neighbors mostly retirees, their mother seeming defeated. The kids looked bored and angry, unlike the open, smiling, easy sociability of Franny and Ginny.

She knew she had been sheltered in New York, but she had never bothered to consider just how different their privileged lives were. There had been this understanding, unspoken, that life in Manhattan was a precursor to their eventual flight, to a sanctuary somewhere, where they would be even more buffered from the increasingly calamitous global ailings. She and her friends had occasionally exchanged plans about their futures and the sanctuaries many of them had already purchased in preparation for their eventual flight when Manhattan island actually sank and the entire country turned to desert. But Manhattan itself had also been a kind of sanctuary. True, the elements interfered occasionally—the erratic weather, the closing of the FDR and the West Side Highway, the regular suspension of certain subway lines because of flooding—but the city itself was a bubble of relative prosperity compared to the real America
of constant brush fires and droughts and heat and desertification. And now, without Arthur, she had nothing with which to shelter her girls from the world.

Sharon asked about Gemma's girls, who were in the next room, playing X
³
-Box with Sharon's son and daughter. Gemma said they were bearing up okay. “They miss their father.”

“That was a hell of a thing,” Sharon said. “And I thought you'd found a way out of this mess. Rich guy. Hedge funds or whatever.”

“Maybe there is no way out of this mess.”

As they sipped from their iced tea, from the bedroom they could hear the exaggerated revving of a computer game–generated engine noise.

Franny and Ginny emerged. “Can we go outside?”

Damon and Dahlia followed.

Sharon looked at Gemma, who shrugged.

“Okay, but stay close. Don't go up into the bluff or into the canyon. Have some water before you go. You'll dehydrate. You have sunscreen on?”

“Yes,” all four lied.

Then Sharon turned to Gemma. “There's four of them. Coyotes won't mess with that many.”

When the kids were gone, Sharon looked at Gemma and smiled. “Aren't we a sight? All grown up, with kids and no husbands.”

“And what a place we've grown up into.”

“But I always knew it was like this. Like in high school, it wasn't, like, the prettiest girl would date the handsomest guy. And then the next-cutest, and so on, so that it was all shared equal. It was, the prettiest girl had every guy in the school after her, and the rest of us were left with scraps. And look who I married? John Lapalm.”

“It wasn't like that, was it?”

“It was. Maybe you wouldn't know, since you were the prettiest girl, or one of them, but then, throughout life, it just keeps going that way, the prettiest, or the richest, they get more of everything, more life, and the rest of us, even those who start out lucky, like me, born into a good town, parents with good jobs, we get left on the outside.”

“I wasn't the prettiest girl,” Gemma insisted.

“Okay, but top three,” Sharon said and laughed. “And look, you had your shot, you are rich, or were, and you got away from all this, so, my theory holds up. You want a beer?”

“Sure,” Gemma said.

They cracked open their beers and drank in silence. “You know, with Kik-Tok, or Facebook before, we see our old photos all the time. Someone is always posting a picture of me from high school, and I look at myself and think, Damn, I was pretty hot. And look at my life back then. I'm at the beach. I'm hanging out with these cute guys at State or by the pier. I'm wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt the day after the concert, standing there, posing with Michelle Alpert. It looks like paradise, like we are having the best time ever, and at the time I didn't even know it, so I wonder, in twenty years: Are we going to look at photos of now, of me with my kids living in a trailer, and think, Damn, that looks like the best time ever? ‘Girl, you were really living it up then!' And imagine how shitty my life would have to be then, in the future, to look at my life now and think, Hot damn, I want some of that.”

Gemma shook her head. “Past performance isn't any indication of future returns.”

“What's that?”

“It's something finance guys use, a disclaimer. There are no guarantees.”

They heard a scream from down the street. “Mom!”

Both women lunged from their chairs and were down the porch steps in seconds.

They saw three figures down the street, their shadows cast long and inland in the afternoon sun, the light making it hard to see which three of the four children were standing there. Running toward them, the women were already silently wishing their two kids were among the three.
Please, let my children be safe.

But Gemma soon saw that Ginny was missing.

“Where is she?” she shouted.

The children pointed between the trailers, up toward the hill.

“Coyotes,” the boy said. “W-w-we were up the hill, in the bushes, and I heard yipping, so I ran down, told the girls to follow. Didn't see Ginny.”

“I told you don't go up the bluffs!” Sharon shouted.

Gemma ran between the trailers and up the hill, climbing the loose-packed and clodded earth in her flats, scratching her shins against the scrub. “Ginny!” she shouted.

“Call someone!” she shouted down toward Sharon.

She ran up a drainage ditch half-filled with dirt and empty, flattened plastic bottles.

“Ginny!”

She stopped and surveyed the bluffs. There was no sign of her. The hill stretched up for a hundred yards and then the angle flattened and she could not see what was beyond. The brush that looked so gentle from the highway was here shoulder high and dense. Her daughter could be anywhere.

How had she let this happen? A child wandering off while her mother drank beer. Why had the rest of the children not kept better track of Ginny? Where was her fucking husband? Where was her pepper spray? Where, where?

She cursed herself for ever leaving New York, for returning to California, and told herself that if she found Ginny, she would never, ever let her out of her sight again.

A trail cut off up the hill and she followed it, through a trash-strewn clearing that looked like a spot where teenagers drank beer, and then up a steeper path over crystalline yellow rocks. She had broken a sweat now, and was bleeding from her cuts, but she still had the energy to climb and then survey the bluff from this higher altitude, the trailer park spreading out below her. Sharon and the kids were no longer on the street where she had left them. Perhaps Sharon had taken the kids back to her trailer and taken up the search herself.

She regretted not having her phone.

The expanse of the area, which from the highway had seemed a deserted strip, now appeared vast and frightening. So many places for so many nasty things to hide. Where should she begin looking? She walked along the trail to a jutting ridge, seeking a clear vantage point around the bluffs that cut north into a canyon. But on the other side was just more brush broken by the occasional copse of oak or bunches of grotesquely twisted cacti. There were acres and acres tucked in here, the land undulating and folding over ridges and points and into pocket valleys and shoebox canyons. The land was divided occasionally by drainage ditches and traversed by animal trails, but despite its proximity to civilization it seemed to Gemma cruelly inhospitable. And Ginny had gone missing in this huge coyote den?