The Wangs vs. the World(24)
“Wow, it’s so pretty! It’s huge!” she said, squeezing his hand.
Charles didn’t answer. Instead, he felt the helicopter sway from side to side like an old-fashioned cradle and wondered if this was one of those daredevil pilots who was going to try to get a rise out of them by pretending he was about to crash. Charles felt the sweat prickle under the rough linen of his Rive Gauche safari shirt and was just about to tap their pilot on the shoulder when the man’s voice broke into their prerecorded tour narration.
“Folks, we seem to be having a problem—”
And then a wild, sick lurch and a screech from the front seat as the pilot—a former Coast Guard sergeant who completely lost hold of his military demeanor—gave up control of the craft. Their helicopter slammed into one of the 270-million-year-old Kaibab Limestone formations, bounced, once, on a ridge, and exploded as it dropped five thousand feet to the floor of the canyon.
Still on the ridge: Charles, saved by his sartoriphilia.
The bounce threw an un-seat-belted Charles against the improperly latched door, flinging him out while slowing his trajectory just enough that he landed with no more force than, say, a fall off a bicycle. Charles experienced the entire event as a flash of heat and steel and noise, accompanied by a gunpowder-and-roses smell so unexpectedly sweet that he was sure he’d open his eyes to find himself in the testing room of one of his factories, a broken vial of rose oil at his feet. Instead, he stood at the edge of death, choking on dust and surprise, wiping mule shit from his shirt, and was instantly flooded with a shameful relief. He wasn’t happy that May Lee was almost certainly gone, but as he looked down on the fireball at the bottom of the grand and glorious canyon, he knew that luck had once again smiled upon Charles Wang.
十二
Vernon, CA
186 Miles
DRIVING SOUTHEAST on two and a half hours of freeways, plus an hour at a U-Haul rental place on Western and Venice, landed the Wangs behind a building in Vernon close to sunset. Covered with a faded mural of giant Aztec women grinding maize under gargantuan stalks of corn, the former tortilla plant was now—or was until last week, at least—one of the three buildings that warehoused the output of Charles’s factories.
He still had the key. In fact, he still had all of his keys, encircling a wide brass ring, each bearing a piece of dark green label tape embossed with a number and a letter. This was the fifth property that he had acquired, after the vast mixing plant in Garden Grove and before the former aircraft hangar next to a thread manufacturer downtown, so he located key 5a (the front door) and 5d (the back door). 5b was for the bathroom and 5c opened the small office inside the warehouse. The letters were assigned depending on Charles’s own migratory patterns: whichever door he opened first received an a, and then onwards through the alphabet, so that each time he revisited a place it also meant retracing that first heady rush of acquisition.
“Dad, what are we doing here?”
“Daddy just getting some things to put in the U-Haul. No problem.”
Charles slammed the car door shut. Let them puzzle over what he was doing; better that than to explain or ask permission. Anything stealthy was always best done out in the open; confidence was the truest disguise. Not that there would be anyone else watching in this strange little city where only factories and warehouses lived. He and KoKo had once explored their way through Vernon after her first big order went into production—she in a violet-and-canary-patterned kimono minidress and platform sneakers, he in a crisp, banded straw fedora, walking arm in arm through the dusty streets littered with salsa-smeared balls of foil and other taco-truck detritus. Now KoKo wouldn’t even speak to him and that fedora was still hanging on a peg in his closet, waiting to be sold off.
Charles rounded the corner. When the bank took possession of his properties, he’d been required to sign a stack of contracts, one of which ensured that he would no longer approach or access any of them. The surveillance cams weren’t mentioned in the endless triplicates that he signed, each with a flourish bigger than the last, so Charles had asked Manny, the manager—so satisfying that match between name and occupation!—to switch them all off. He’d never bothered to contract with an outside security firm; pricey as it was, there wasn’t much of a black market in argan oil.
This should be simple. Go in the front door, grab a dolly from the office, locate the fifteen boxes that were marked for Ellie and Trip Yates in Opelika, Alabama, go out through the back door, load up the U-Haul, maybe slip the dolly in with the boxes, and speed back onto the 10 freeway.
And then he saw it. Glinting betrayal in the form of a new doorknob, gaudy gilt where the old brass one, worn smooth by years of maize-powdered hands, had once been.
Now the sun felt almost unbearably hot and Charles backtracked around the corner only to spot the same Home Depot special on the rear door. Alright. There was one more solution left.
“Gracie . . .?,” said Charles, leaning in through the driver’s side window. “You want to help Daddy?”
She looked up, frowning at him. “With what?”
Charles paused. It was hard to predict what would launch Grace into a wounded fury. She never used to be like that, his Gracie. It was his fault. He never should have sent her away. Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father’s shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path. No. Not yet. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness. Straightening to his full five feet eight inches and sucking in his stomach so that his shirt rode smoothly into the waistband of his trousers, Charles cocked his head at Grace and gestured for her to get out of the car.