Devil House(58)
“This is our home,” Seth said insistently at one point, his pitch ascending the scale.
Alex laughed. “It’s not really anybody’s ‘home,’” he said.
“It’s your home right now,” Angela said.
“It’s my spot right now,” Alex corrected. “Sometimes you just have a spot.”
“Any other spot we find isn’t really going to be ours,” Seth said. “Fuck this.”
“I knew some long-timers in San Francisco who used to shit in their tents if they got cleared out of an underpass,” Alex offered; Angela winced.
“That’s no good, though. You know? Nobody can tell one person’s shit from anybody else’s,” Seth said, a vision upon him, the sort of thing that made him feel like when he finally found his life’s purpose it would be something special the whole world would understand. “We just have to show them something that says this place is ours no matter what else they do to it, something they’ll remember after they see it even if the next thing they do is tear it all down.”
Angela pursed her lips against a smile; Seth sounded like he was quoting something he’d seen on a Saturday morning cartoon, sprinkling it with dirty words to make it more applicable to the moment.
“That’s a good speech, Seth,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, already headed for the far wall. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into the top pocket, retrieving an X-Acto knife and a red Sharpie. For a second Angela felt panic: Was he crazy? Was he going to try something stupid?
But instead he did that which is recorded both in the Polaroids and in the tabloids which would describe the details of those renderings in future days, that act of wonder from which proceeded the great days of the castle, candle-short days marked both by mad revelry and the solemn raising of the ramparts: those thin but fearsome fortifications meant to guard the Knights of the Broken Mirror, who bore but few arms, if any, against those intruders then clearing the near horizon.
He slashed the number 7 into a section of the wall with his knife, then drew a circle around it in marker. Then he traced the 7 with the marker in one quick, intentionally sloppy movement, bringing it into harsh relief.
“They’ll put this place on the TV news when they find out,” he said in triumph to the gentle assembly.
MINOANS V
Seth was off to the races. In his mind, he imagined Alex and Angela joining in with abandon, caught up in his vision of turning the inside of the store into a scarecrow for the authorities. He was like this whenever an idea took hold of him. It had been causing him trouble all his life.
They watched at first. It was fun to watch Seth when he got wound up about something. Everybody knew it. After a while, Alex joined in; it would have been bad manners to sit and stare, even if his feeling for shared activity had been blunted by too much time alone. Awkward in his movements, he approached Seth’s backpack, leaning over it and asking: “Is it just pens?”
“There’s some cans in the storage closet,” Seth said. “They’re Derrick’s.” This was an untruth, if a harmless one: the spray cans belonged to the store, its quickest remedy for the regulars who kept writing their phone numbers and local meeting places in ballpoint on the walls and seats of the viewing booths. Angela saw Alex register Seth’s words and then turn toward the counter: first the turn, then the onset of forward motion, slow, mechanical. He moved his body like it didn’t belong to him. It was hard to watch.
All the while, she did her best to ignore the many parts of the store that were still exactly as they’d been before Anthony Hawley turned the OPEN sign around for good. She didn’t consider herself a prude, but the more of the interior her peripheral vision picked up, the less she liked it. After the homecoming dance, at the curb in front of her house, her date had tried to show her a glossy European magazine with brief text in French captioning explicit pictures of people having sex: Douce Ma?tresse. It was vile; she was relieved when her father, inside the house, flipped the porch light on to let her know he’d registered their arrival and was marking time. “I had a good time tonight. My father will kill you if he sees that,” she said to her date, opening the passenger-side door before he could lean in for a kiss.
She was a good student; she never skipped class, and she signed up for all the extracurriculars that were supposed to help you get into the universities—debate team, student government. She was hoping to make assistant manager at 7-Eleven before she left for college; she’d been told that colleges loved to see first-year students who arrived trailing a list of credentials. It had made for a lot of tension thus far, trying to make her last year count; two months in, she was feeling the strain.
She looked hard at the entrance through which she’d come after convincing Alex, her hand cupped to the door, that it was really her; she noted the double crossbar now reinforcing it in case somebody breached the dead bolt.
She decided to use broad-tipped permanent markers instead of the spray cans, because she didn’t want to get any paint on her clothes.
HUGH THE FAT
In Hollywood for the weekend, staying at his friend Keith’s rental on North Hayworth, Marc Buckler treated himself and his host to a half gram of cocaine. It was the weekend, and he was on the cusp of what felt like a big step forward. Locally, his property bids kept getting undercut by buyers who could afford short-term losses for the sake of increasing their holdings. He’d tried making moves in places where he couldn’t imagine any real action—Rowland Heights, Baldwin Park, Walnut—but most of the time he came away holding the short straw. He liked to think of himself as a renegade, a little guy trying to knock a few jewels loose from the collars on the big dogs.