Crawlers Read online

  Cal took in the scene as he walked up, tugging up his droopy pants. He walked over to his dad, swiping the rebounding basketball, passing it over Adair’s head back to Mom. Adair squealed in mock outrage as Mom faked her out to the left, darted around her. “You got to be faster than that, Adair!”

  “Oh, like I want to be a jock like you, Mom!” But Adair was grinning as she skillfully flicked the ball away from her mom’s hand.

  “What you got going on?” Cal asked, looking over the gear spread out on the worktable beside the driveway. “That filter still choking up?”

  “It needs to be replaced. I’ve got a contract for next weekend— sunk cabin cruiser. It’s only forty feet of water so they figure it might be worth it to raise her. Hull’s tight, so . . .”

  Adair paused, glancing at her brother.

  “A contract?” Cal looked at his dad hopefully—then looked away, hiding again. That’s how it seemed to Adair.

  She passed the ball to her mom, who went to the imaginary free throw line to practice.

  Dad had probably figured out what Cal was thinking. But Dad was in a good mood. He hadn’t been drinking for a good while; he’d been taking his antidepressants. And he was over being mad: Cal had gotten puking drunk one night, a few months earlier—and next day, hungover, he ran their boat aground on a sandbar. They’d had to be towed off, which cost money, and Dad had said Cal was too irresponsible to work with. Maybe Dad’s own drinking issues made him come down hard on Cal.

  Cal hadn’t done any binge-drinking since, that Adair knew of. He acted as if what Dad thought didn’t matter to him. But she knew it mattered, big-time.

  Blowing into the filter, Dad said, “You going to help me out, Cal? I’ll give you eight bucks an hour, best I can do.”

  “Oh, God, Nick, you shouldn’t have to pay him,” Mom said, pausing with the ball in her hands. Catching her breath. These days, she was mostly a coach and not so much an athlete. “He lives with us. We feed him.” She shot the ball, missed. Adair caught the rebound.

  “Hey, he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to be paid,” Dad said.

  Adair bounced the basketball to her mom, watched her take a shot, and felt, for a moment, that maybe everything was going to be all right. She knew Mom was unhappy with her, though she’d never said so. Mom not liking Adair’s computer-art obsession, her interest in sharing art files over the Internet—like she thought Adair was secretly dealing in porn, or something. She’d felt like her mom wanted her to be more into feminism and athletics. Or become a teacher. Yeah, like her.

  Zilch interest from Adair in teaching, and Mom had given out a faint but perpetual air of disappointment, until yesterday—when Mom’d seen her artwork in the digital-art show at the Youth Center. It was the best stuff there, and Mom had been proud. And today they were having fun together on Mom’s turf.

  Cal and Dad were getting back together, and Dad was talking, and working, not in that black funk he’d been in for so long, when he’d been secretly drinking and plunking his guitar alone on his boat at two in the morning.

  And she’d met a cool guy, Waylon, at school. He was a year ahead of her, a junior. He’d asked for her screen name so he could instant-message her, and they’d talked late last night on-line. Today was sunny, and birds were singing, and Mom was throwing her the ball again and smiling, and Dad was laughing at some story Cal was telling about what a spaced-out knucklehead his cousin Mason was.

  And it was funny how things came together and came apart and came together again, in pulses, in patterns. But then, didn’t that mean that things would have to come apart again?

  Or maybe something else was coming. Something new.

  And for some reason, as she paused to take her free throw, she found herself staring at the sky.

  November 19

  On the night the light screamed in the sky, Adair was walking with Waylon Kulick, the two of them looking at the television shine in picture windows. Two teenagers looking for something to do on an unseasonably warm evening.

  But if you didn’t have a car, and you lived where the mass transit was lame, you were stuck between the suburbs and the horse ranches, making it up as you went.

  “What I like to do,” Waylon said, “is walk around at night and try to guess what people are watching on TV, just by the lights you see in their windows.”

  He said it in a nervous way, like he was wondering, Will she think I’m a geek?

  “How do you do that?” Adair asked. They were walking down Pinecrest Street, which meandered along the little defile between Pinecrest Ridge and the high, deer-trammeled grassy hills of the protected watershed.

  Adair took the little glow tube out of her mouth and looked at it lighting up the palm of her hand in soft green. It was a souvenir from the rave her big brother had taken her to—glowing like the TV lights in the living room windows.

  Waylon glanced at it. “That’s hella weird shit, people putting glow sticks in their mouths and little blinking things in their ears at raves.”

  “I know. And vibrators in their pockets.” She tossed the little light-stick in the air and watched him effortlessly catch it. Good hand-eye coordination.

  Waylon was tall, too, and leanly muscular, but she was guessing he wasn’t a team type. Too bad: the Quiebra Cougars could’ve used the help on the basketball court.

  He was cute, all right, though it was a bit spoiled by the perpetual scowl, the harshness of a pig-shave haircut relieved only by a few Day-Glo blue spikes; just now they seemed to go with the light-stick.

  He held the small light-stick up between two fingers to watch it glow against the backdrop of the night. It was the color of cemetery fox fire.

  Just to see how he’d react, she said, “Ooh, yuck. It’s still got my spit on it.”

  He permitted himself a brief grin. “Gross. Here, take it back with your, like, DNA samples all over it. That came from a rave? We didn’t have any raves where I lived in New York. They got some on Long Island, I heard, over by the Sound, but we were alla way upstate.”

  Adair found herself looking around—unsure what she was looking for. It was like she could feel the night itself, waiting for something, and that made her wait for it, too.

  Mostly she looked over her shoulder, at the sky. She could see lots of stars, out here, since there weren’t really enough streetlights.

  Something else is coming. She could definitely feel it.

  It wasn’t like she was psychic; she never really knew what was going to happen. But sometimes—maybe once or twice a year—a kind of weight was in the air, a feeling of bigness impending. The feelings weren’t frequent. But now and then, only that much, she’d feel something she could never identify till it happened: Oh, that’s what that feeling was about.

  She’d felt something was going to happen the day before her dad had his breakdown. Sometimes—just sometimes—she could feel changes coming the way animals supposedly could feel a storm about to break.

  She felt a tightening right now. It was like the night air was something you could roll onto a spindle, stretch it up like a guitar string, tighter and tighter.

  “What you lookin’ at?” he said, following her gaze into the sky.

  “Nothing.” What was she looking for? She didn’t know. “Um, you glad your mom moved to California?”

  “I don’t know, ask me after I’ve been here more’n a month.” He stared off into the dark hills. Adding, “I can’t see my dad much, living out here.” He seemed to realize he’d exposed himself a little, and blurted a change of subject. “And I mean, fuck, Quiebra, California, it’s sort of embarrassing—”

  “Oh, thanks, my town is all embarrassing!”

  “Just the name. Quiebra. It’s, like, Spanish for queer-bait.”

  She snorted, not quite laughing. “Don’t say that at school, you’ll get your butt kicked.”

  “Ooh, I’m all scared of that. What the fuck’s that mean, Quiebra?”

  “I think it means like b
roken or . . . a crack in the ground or something. It has to do with they had an earthquake once, in this area, when the Spanish people were here, like before the white people, and there was a big ol’ earthquake crack formed the first day they were here.”

  “Oh, great. Now I live in a town named after a fucking crack in the ground. What’s Spanish for butt crack?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Ex-cuse me? Um, shut up?”

  “Earthquakes, huh. Hey, where’s the earthquake crack?”

  Adair shrugged. “Gone, I guess, probably. Filled up. I think it was over in the next town anyway, probably, in Pinole. Anyway, we’re closer here to San Francisco than you were to New York City. We’re right across the bay. San Francisco is cool.”

  “Yeah, right, the town of Queer-Bait across the bay from fucking San Francisco, home of gay parades and shit.”

  But he said it in a way that made her smile, because he was laughing at himself as he said it. The familiar shade of irony people put on everything. You knew he was the kind of guy who could have a friend who was gay and maybe give him a little shit about it, but neither of them taking it seriously. That’s why she liked him, and almost trusted him.

  He was the kind of guy who’d make fun of Latino people sometimes, too—but she’d seen him be really nice to Suzie Jalesca, who was Mexican and a flagrant lesbo, and you could tell it was the way he really felt about it: Like there was an obligation to make fun of people of every kind. Make fun of them for being trailer-park whites, ghetto gangbangers, low-rider cholos, white Republican drones, knee-jerk liberals, computer nerds, football fanatics, gays, whatever. Just make fun of them all because that made them all equal. People were more the same than different, and guys like Waylon knew that.

  She looked at a TV light shining, blinking web-colored onto the darkened lawn of the house they were passing. “I’d like to do some photography of that . . . just get that glow.”

  “You into cameras and shit?” It was a gruff way of asking, but he seemed really interested.

  “Yeah, I took an after-school class, and I’m sort of hooked on it. It’d be hard to do something like colored lights from a window at night—I mean, to get it the way it really should look. I’m still learning—and I’ve got a kind of half-assed Canon my mom got me for Christmas last year.”

  “I always wanted to do that. Photography or movie cameras or something. I can play some guitar, is all.”

  “My brother plays guitar. Not very good, but he plays. My dad used to sing, but he gave it up.” She tried to peer through the half-curtained picture window of a ranch-style house; past the small saguaro in a cactus garden and under a season flag that showed a simplified harvest cornucopia. “Huh. You can’t see the actual, like, TV sets most of the time. You can really tell what they’re watching from the glow?”

  “Those people are watching The Simpsons reruns. I just saw some colors that means Bart threw something at Lisa.”

  “You know too much about television. You should go on that show, Beat the Geeks.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “My mom . . . watching TV’s about all we do together. Watch TV when she’s—”

  He seemed about to say something more, but broke off. Another touchy area. But she knew what it was. Maybe they had something in common.

  They came to a corner, followed it around till they were walking down Birdsong toward Owlswoop Avenue.

  Quiebra was right on the edge of a wilderness preserve. The coyotes were somewhere near, hoping a fat, slow old cat would get restless enough to come up into the hills that crowded the street.

  There were rattlers up there, too. They’d come down from the hills and canyons to ease soundlessly through the ivy between houses. Raccoons raided garbage cans, and there were so many horned owls some nights it sounded, Adair’s mom said, “like an owl convention.”

  Adair smiled, seeing jack-o’-lanterns still on people’s porches, starting to sag like they were elderly people beginning to fall in on themselves. There was still a Halloween feeling in the air. The O’Haras still had their Halloween lawn scene up three weeks past the time. A life-size plastic skeleton hung from a noose tied to an ornamental plum tree branch, swaying and grinning. A ghost made of white polyester gently bobbed in the slightly growing breeze on a wire depending from a clothesline stretched from the roof to the tree. Rain-shredded black crepe still hung around the front door, with fake cobwebs and half a dozen rubber bats. Two big, wrinkled-up jack-o’-lanterns sat to either side of the porch step. There were gray-painted Styrofoam tombstones in the lawn, some of them knocked over. They had legends on them like, GEORGE DIED HAPPY, GEORGE DIED QUICK, TOO MUCH LIKKER’LL MAKE YOU SICK.

  Pretty soon the O’Haras would take the Halloween decorations down, store them in cardboard boxes in the garage, and put up the Christmas stuff. They did everything over the top. Her mom said the garish coating of Christmas lights and props made the O’Haras’ house look like a carnival midway. But Adair liked it that way.

  “I like how people leave their Halloween and Christmas decorations up way too long,” Adair said. “I think it’s tight. I wish it was always Halloween, like that place where Jack lived in that Tim Burton movie—”

  “Yeah! That’s a fucking tight movie!” he said, much to her relief.

  Adair and Waylon turned a corner, and the owls declared themselves. One talking to another, tree to tree. Some smaller night bird twittered and muttered and twittered again. Then fell silent.

  Then the owls went quiet, too. Waylon was talking about how back home he and his friend had made some kind of Halloween explosive out of cherry bombs with confetti and wax cups and match heads, made some kind of motherhump beautiful blast. But she only half heard him. She felt the night air tighten a little more. The string might break.

  Then he started talking about TV lights in windows again, and she tried to make herself listen, but it was hard, with that feeling growing on her.

  He pointed at a half-curtained front room window. “It’s like, that window there? You can see just see the light from the TV on the ceiling, but it’s, like, pulsing real fast, and it’s got a lot of red in it? See that? What kind of show you think that is?”

  She shrugged. “Um, an action movie?”

  “Totally. I check the listings when I get home sometimes, if my mom’s not on-line and I can get on.”

  So he was like most of her friends: he’d almost always rather go on-line, more than anything else, at night. Maybe he was just out with her now because he couldn’t get the access line.

  The string was twisting tighter.

  “What about that one, across the street?” she asked. “What’re they watching? I’m not sure about that one, are you?”

  “Oh, yeah. That blue light, and it’s not flickering that much? It’s a drama, or a love story. Because if the light is, like, all jumping around, it’s more actiony, or at least a cop story. Yeah, it just got some soft reddish colors in it . . . a love story. Maybe that movie with Kevin Costner about the message in the bottle.”

  “That was so lame.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Really.” He sang, softly, “ ‘I had a vision . . . there wasn’t any television.’ ”

  She remembered the lines. “The Pixies, isn’t it?”

  He gave Adair a look of surprised admiration that kindled a warmth in her. “Yeah. So—okay . . .” He pointed. “There’s that big brown house, they’re watching either an action movie or it’s the action part of a movie. Look at those flashes, explosions, everything. It’s like the family’s having a firefight in their living room, man.”

  “They’re all, like, shooting people in their minds,” she said. She glanced at him to see if he thought she was uncool to say that. But he was nodding gravely.

  Encouraged, she went on, “Look over there—you can see through the curtains, it’s, like, really dark but there are little spears of light . . . science fiction shit.”

  “Totally. See, you got it.”

  It gave her a spacey,
displaced feeling, looking at the TV lights in the windows; the colored shadows of media dreams.

  Waylon articulated some part of her thoughts, but then he took it to extremes that seemed typical of him. “It’s like you’re seeing hypnosis lights. You know, like when a hypnotist uses flashing spinning lights on people. Like we get all these suggestions fed to us all night through television.” He seemed to go into a kind of verbal reverie, talking to himself, reciting something, she thought, as much as talking to her. Like he was rehearsing for an exposé. “People even know, they make jokes about how TV brainwashes them to buy things. I read they use frequencies that make you go to sleep, and into a hypnotic state, and they put in subliminal messages.” Then he seemed to catch himself and glanced at her. “You think I’m, like, paranoid.”

  “I think you’re into conspiracy theories.” Then she did that snaking move with her head like her friend Siseela, and did her best black-chick imitation. “It’s all good, G.”

  He snorted, and it was his way of laughing.

  But that tightening feeling was still nagging her. Adair forced it to the back of her mind. Think about something else.

  She thought about wandering by Cleo’s house, letting Cleo see her with Waylon. Cleo had gone from being her best friend to acting like Adair was a loser. Sometimes, anyway. They were barely talking, because Adair had been becoming friends with Cleo’s boyfriend, Donny, a good-looking, way-too-serious black guy who was into African-American politics and could’ve played basketball, but didn’t want to because he thought it was a stereotype.

  But Donny had been dating Cleo a long time; Cleo with her sparkling blue eyes and blond hair and her confidence. Cleo had been getting more and more popular, and Adair was just one of the tolerated kids, not someone to be punked, but not really popular.

  But then she decided that it would be just as shallow as Cleo to show Waylon off. And her other friend, Danelle, acted real bored when her friends talked about men, or hung out with men, as if it was so puny and stupid, but Adair knew it was because Danelle was overweight and defensive about not getting dates. Anyway, Danelle was on the other side of town.