been?”
“You called me ten minutes ago, and where I’ve been is running traffic lights and mowing down schoolkids in crosswalks.”
“There’s a twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit inside this community,” the security guard advised solemnly.
Glowering up at Skeet Caulfield, Motherwell shook his fist. “Man, I’d like to hammer that punk.”
“He’s a confused kid,” Dusty said.
“He’s a drug-sucking jerk,” Motherwell disagreed.
“He’s been clean lately.”
“He’s a sewer.”
“You’ve got such a big heart, Ned.”
“What’s important is I’ve got a brain, and I’m not going to screw it up with drugs, and I don’t want to be around people who self-destruct, like him.”
Ned, the crew foreman, was a Straight Edger. This unlikely but still-growing movement among people in their teens and twenties — more men than women — required adherents to forgo drugs, excess alcohol, and casual sex. They were into head-banging rock-’n’-roll, slam-dancing, self-restraint, and self-respect. One element or another of the establishment might have embraced them as an inspiring cultural trend — if Straight Edgers had not loathed the system and despised both major political parties. Occasionally, at a club or concert, when they discovered a doper among them, they beat the crap out of him and didn’t bother to call it tough love, which was also a practice likely to keep them out of the political mainstream.
Dusty liked both Motherwell and Skeet, although for different reasons. Motherwell was smart, funny, and reliable — if judgmental. Skeet was gentle and sweet — although probably doomed to a life of joyless self- indulgence, days without purpose, and nights filled with loneliness.
Motherwell was by far the better employee of the two. If Dusty had operated strictly by the textbook rules of intelligent business management, he would have cut Skeet from the crew a long time ago.
Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn’t feel like the right way.
“We’re probably going to get rained out,” Dusty said. “So why’d you send him up on the roof in the first place?”
“I didn’t. I told ’im to sand the window casings and the trim on the ground floor. Next thing I know, he’s up there, saying he’s going to take a header into the driveway.”
“I’ll get him.”
“I tried. Closer I came to him, the more hysterical he got.”
“He’s probably scared of you,” Dusty said.
“He damn well better be. If
The guard flipped open his cell phone. “Maybe I’d better call the police.”
If the cops came, they might get Skeet down safely, but then they would commit him to a psychiatric ward, where he’d be held for at least three days. Probably longer. The last thing Skeet needed was to fall into the hands of one of those head doctors who were unreservedly enthusiastic about dipping into the psychoactive pharmacopoeia to ladle up a fruit punch of behavior-modification drugs that, while imposing a short-term placidity, would ultimately leave him with more short-circuiting synapses than he had now.
“Neighborhoods like this,” Dusty said, “don’t want spectacles.”
Surveying the immense houses along the street, the regal palms and stately ficuses, the well-tended lawns and flower beds, the guard said, “I’ll give you ten minutes.”
Motherwell raised his right fist and shook it at Skeet.
Under the circling halo of crows, Skeet waved.
The security guard said, “Anyway, he doesn’t look suicidal.”
“The little geek says he’s happy because an angel of death is sitting beside him,” Motherwell explained, “and the angel has shown him what it’s like on the other side, and what it’s like, he says, is really awesomely cool.”
“I’ll go talk to him,” Dusty said.
Motherwell scowled. “Talk, hell. Give him a push.”
3
As the heavy sky, swollen with unspent rain, sagged toward the earth and as the wind rose, Martie and the dog returned home at a trot. She repeatedly glanced down at her pacing shadow, but then the storm clouds overwhelmed the sun, and her dark companion vanished as if it had seeped into the earth, returning to some netherworld.
She surveyed nearby houses as she passed them, wondering if anyone had been at a window to see her peculiar behavior, hoping that she hadn’t actually looked as odd as she’d felt.
In this picturesque neighborhood, the homes were generally old and small, though many were lovingly detailed, possessing more charm and character than half the
Martie, Dusty, and Valet lived in a perfectly scaled, two-story, miniature Victorian with gingerbread millwork. Dusty had painted the structure in the colorful yet sophisticated tradition of Victorian houses on certain streets in San Francisco: pale yellow background; blue, gray, and green ornamentation; with a judicious use of pink in a single detail along the cornice and on the window pediments.
Martie loved their home and thought it was a fine testament to Dusty’s talent and craftsmanship.
Her mother, however, upon first seeing the paint job, had declared, “It looks as if clowns live here.”
As Martie opened the wooden gate at the north side of the house and followed Valet along the narrow brick walkway to the backyard, she wondered if her unreasonable fear somehow had its origins in the depressing telephone call from her mother. After all, the greatest source of stress in her life was Sabrina’s refusal to accept Dusty. These were the two people whom Martie loved most in all the world, and she longed for peace between them.
Dusty wasn’t part of the problem. Sabrina was the only combatant in this sad war. Frustratingly, Dusty’s refusal to engage in battle seemed only to harden her hostility.
Stopping at the trash enclosure near the back of the house, Martie removed the lid from one of the cans and deposited the blue plastic bag full of Valet’s finest.
Perhaps her sudden inexplicable anxiety had been spawned by her mother’s whining about Dusty’s supposed paucity of ambition and about his lack of what Sabrina deemed an adequate education. Martie was afraid that her mother’s venom would eventually poison her marriage. Against her will, she might start to see Dusty through her mother’s mercilessly critical eyes. Or maybe Dusty would begin to resent Martie for the low esteem in which Sabrina held him.
In fact, Dusty was the wisest man Martie had ever known. The engine between his ears was even more finely tuned than her father’s had been, and Smilin’ Bob had been immeasurably smarter than his nickname implied. As for ambition…Well, she would rather have a kind husband than an ambitious one, and you’d find more kindness in Dusty than you’d find greed in Vegas.
Besides, Martie’s own career didn’t fulfill the expectations her mother had for her. After earning a bachelor’s degree — majoring in business, minoring in marketing — followed by an M.B.A., she had detoured from the road that might have taken her to high-corporate-executive glory. Instead, she became a freelance video-game designer. She’d sold a few minor hits entirely of her own creation, and on a for-hire basis she had designed scenarios, characters, and fantasy worlds based on concepts by others. She earned good money, if not yet great, and she
