I negotiated a curve in silence, waiting for her to get it. The Pacific slapped in disinterestedly to our right. When she didn't get it, I said, “Being dead.”
“Oh,” she said dismissively. “That.”
“The dead can't fart,” I said, losing points.
“They don't have to. They already smell bad.”
We let a mile or so pass in malodorous silence. When I felt reasonably safe from scorn, I lowered my window.
“Chicken,” she said, sounding pleased for the first time. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and checked it for split ends. “I knew you were chicken. Blister should have farted at you. You would have fallen down the stairs headfirst.” She gave up on her hair.
“What are you doing with a coke dealer?”
She emitted an exasperated little poof of air. “He's not just a dealer. He's a person too. Anyway, don't go figuring I hang around with him just so he can keep me high.”
“Then what is it? His stomach muscles?”
“Oh, give me credit. I tried it. Why wouldn't I? But then I quit. Who wants to feel fast and stupid at the same time? It's like the Super Bowl, you know? There's always two guys talking: the big slow dumb guy and the little fast dumb guy. Who wants to be the little fast dumb guy?”
“Jessica,” I said, turning to her. “How did you get this way? I knew you when you were one year old.”
“You have the advantage of me,” she said loftily. “And how about you keep your eyes on the road?”
I eyed the road, reflecting on the exchange between Wyatt, Annie, and me on the previous evening, when I'd asked them if I could have Jessica. First I'd reexplained the case I was working on.
“Are you kidding?” Annie had said. “She could get
“She could get scared,” I'd said. “Right now, she feels like she'll live forever, no matter what she does. Screw around with Blister? No problem. Run away? So what? All she has to do is come home and flash that old Jessica smile and you'll both be falling all over each other to make her bed and buy her school clothes.”
“So what are you saying?” Wyatt had asked. He wasn't crazy about the fact that I'd been up at Blister's with him that night; he was, after all, Wyatt Wilmington the Third, even if he had decided to be a carpenter rather than a real-estate mogul like his father, and his family had always kept its problems to itself. It was the sacred WASP tradition: what matters is what people can see. Keep it secret, and maybe it can be fixed before it makes the papers.
“Wyatt,” I said. He was my oldest friend, and Annie had been my girlfriend when I introduced her to Wyatt all those years ago when we were innocent students at UCLA. “Wyatt, I'm in the family. She's my goddaughter. I drove Annie to the hospital when she was going to be born, with the two of you in the back seat. You remember how smoothly I took the curves?”
Wyatt gave a grudging nod. He'd been too nervous to drive.
“Well, I'm going to do the same now. She's going to see that kids can't always go home again. She's going to realize for the first time that there are lines that we cross, or don't cross, that can't always be crossed in the other direction. She's going to see kids who can't hope to live more than another couple of years.”
“And you're going to protect her?” That was Annie.
“You're protecting her now?” I said, without really thinking.
There was a long silence, and the two of them exchanged a glance from which I was profoundly excluded. I looked down at my coffee cup. It had coffee in it.
“Why do you want her?” Annie finally said. “What's she supposed to be?”
“She's my I.D. card,” I said. “She'll make me fit in.” Annie shuffled off one of her slippers and looked down at it as though it contained an answer. “Just my I.D. card,” I repeated.
In the car, my I.D. card said, “I'm hungry. This is sure a weird way to spend Easter. Normally I'd be stealing pieces off the ham by now.” It was two o'clock.
“Well, luckily for you, we're going to a restaurant.”
“Will they have ham?”
“If they do, you probably won't recognize it.”
“What restaurant?”
“It's called Tommy's Oki-Burger.”
“Blister's been there,” she said. “He told me something about it.”
“It's Blister's kind of place. What'd he tell you?”
“That it was full of kids who'd split from home. And don't knock Blister. It's boring.”
“Did he tell you what they were doing there?”
“Peddling their butts, he said.”
“That's about it.”
She thought about it for a while. “Why are we going?”
“You're going to help me find a little girl.”
“Is she peddling her butt?”
“Where do you
“Around,” she said, sounding like a teenager for the first time. “Is she?”
“I don't know. For all I know, she's dead.”
“Zowie,” she said, half under her breath. “Is it going to be dangerous?”
“I don't think so. Not for you, at any rate.”
“Hell,” she said, clearly disappointed. After a moment she said, “Well, anyway, it sounds like fun.”
“It does, huh?”
“More fun than Blister,” she said.
Jessica started eating the moment we got to Tommy's. The place was largely empty at first; then, as the afternoon wore on into evening, it began to fill up with the usual highly checkered crowd. The Mountain had spent most of Easter Sunday out on the blacktop parking lot, practicing Sumo wrestling with some other fat guys inside a small circle painted on the asphalt. Jessica had stopped, fascinated, as the fat guys grunted and puffed inside the circle. Finally the Mountain had forced his opponent-a Japanese who couldn't have weighed less than three hundred pounds-outside the circle. He wiped his face with the malodorous cheesecloth and scanned the small crowd that had gathered to watch. He nodded pleasantly down at me, and then his eyes traveled down to Jessica. Cowed a bit by the sheer pleasure of all that sweating male flesh, she had slipped her hand into mine.
The Mountain's face dropped. When he looked back up at me, all semblance of good feeling was gone. He looked like an ill-considered cross between Charles Manson and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Elaborately, he spat at my feet and then he turned his back on us and stepped back into the ring.
“Friend of yours?” Jessica said.
“Not anymore, it seems.” I was debating whether to tap the Mountain on the shoulder and try to explain, when he picked up a man who outweighed the average tractor-trailer semi and threw him out of the ring as though he'd been a Q-Tip. That ended the debate. Jessica and I went back inside and she started to eat.
She'd gotten up to go to the bathroom when two regulars, a couple of pre-op transsexuals, greeted each other with the highest squeals I'd heard since the Beatles played the Bowl, and sat down at the table next to me.
“Dear,” said the blond one, who was attired, despite the chill in the air, in a pair of gym shorts and a K-Mart blouse. “Dear, do you have any pants? Someone stole everything last night: my clothes, my cash, my makeup-even the good stuff, the Avon and the Clinique? Do you know what a girl has to go through to get Clinique? It's more expensive than
“And almost as yellow,” her friend said, snatching up the first cigarette with the air of someone stumbling over a canteen in Death Valley.
“Yellow, yellow, marshmallow. I wouldn't mind looking like the Dragon Lady, as long as I could look like
“Your aura is intact,” the other one said, scanning the street with practiced eyes.
