Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

Mattingly whispered into the phone. “Something new has come up.”

“Do not swear out any warrants. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Penelope had unzipped her legging and was curled into the shape of Infinity writing rapidly down the inside of her left calf. “Stein you are so amazing. You flushed him out! How are you going to bust him?”

“Flushed who out? What are you talking about?”

“Morty Greene?”

“You sure you don’t want to change his name to something more visual?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I’m vulnerable.”

“Then don’t jump from one random thought to another and think it’s logic.”

She watched him resume his search for a proper hiding place.

“Do you know if the bottles have the Espe New Millennium logo embossed on them?” Penelope asked.

“What difference could that possibly make?”

“I know people who were paying three dollars apiece for the old New Radiance bottles. New Millennium’s would be worth a fortune.”

“Ah!” Stein dropped so abruptly to his knees that Penelope might have thought her insight had given him a stroke. He grasped the bottom shelf of the wall unit that housed his stereo equipment-his turntable, cassette tapes, and two hundred albums. “Give me a hand with this.”

“I can’t believe you still have vinyl,” she giggled. “The last living owner of a turntable.”

She grasped the sides of the unit, bent her body like a willow, and tugged mightily. The unit creaked toward her, away from the wall. Stein slithered into the space, reached down through the twistings of speaker wire and puffs of Jurassic dust motes. His hand found the mesh door of the unused air-conditioning duct. He opened the gate and reached in. His fingers rooted blindly in the space. He touched something cold and smooth and leaped back, pulling his hand out.

“What!” Penelope screamed.

“It felt like a termite queen.”

“You can’t have termites in a metal air duct. Let me in there.”

She changed places with him, pulled her long black hair back and pushed her lithe, slender body into the narrow space.

“It’s like up and behind,” Stein guided her.

“I have it. It’s not a termite queen.”

Penelope withdrew a crumpled cellophane bag. Inside that was another sandwich bag, and inside that a ball of silver foil, and inside that a green, seedy, nickel bag of high-school weed.

“Then I think we can presume your daughter knows about this hiding place,” Penelope smiled.

“I’m gonna kill her.”

“Like father like daughter.”

“That’s not funny.”

The phone rang again. Stein grabbed the receiver off the hook as if he were grabbing Mattingly’s throat. “No warrants! I will BE there!”

“Was that school?” Penelope asked, with her deadpan smile.

All the way up Sunset into Bel Air Stein carried on a ferocious inner monologue with Angie: Stein as the biblical God of Vengeance hurling bolts of lightning at the offending nickel bag. Stein as the wounded single parent who had given his daughter trust and respect and been deceived in return. She needed discipline of course, but when he trawled back through his own childhood memories for clues of how to dispense it, he came back empty. His own father had been generally tolerant of him from a safe distance, but had never waded through the waters of adolescent fury or attempted to run the gauntlet that led to the heart. Stein senior had been recalled by the cosmic manufacturer with a defective fuel pump after just forty-nine thousand miles. Maybe that was why it felt so weird to Stein, turning fifty. Outdistancing his ancestor made him feel ancient and unprotected with no one out in front blocking the wind.

It was in this agitated frame of mind that Stein drove up the circular driveway of the bastion of smug privilege called The Academy. The white stucco archways, the rolling hillsides of well-mown lawns, the sixteen-year-old kids in their forty thousand-dollar convertibles, the nannies waiting in their employers’ Range Rovers, as though their employers ever roved a range-it was like going to a resort. “Club Ed,” Stein called it, when he and Hillary argued. He half expected to see an old Negro waiter in a red jacket and white gloves come bustling over the hillside with a rum drink on a tray.

“Hey, Dad.”

Angie and her two girlfriends sauntered over. Elyssa, tall, rail-thin, a dancer, and Megan, a vivacious redhead who knew every 18-year-old boy on the West Side. And Angie, her genetics still locked too tightly in the divorce wars for Stein to see her clearly. He recognized too much of himself in her sharp, protective sense of humor, in the ways she contrived not to be an outsider. He wondered if his own desperate needs were so inadequately camouflaged.

“Get in,” Stein said, making no attempt to be cordial. He heard one of her friends say “uh-oh,” but Angie would not give him the satisfaction of hurrying. She hugged each of her friends, made plans for later, deliberately extending the moment before finally climbing into the back seat, leaving Stein to drive like a chauffeur.

“That was rude,” she said.

“What about sitting in the back? Is that rude?”

She mouthed something unintelligible.

“We’ll have plenty to talk about it when we get home. I promise you that.”

“Whatever.”

They drove in silence. Stein occasionally glanced into the rearview mirror to see the effects of his siege. But she had her earphones plugged in, and was no more affected by his feeble sanctions than a sand crab is by the fluctuations of light on Jupiter.

Penelope Kim’s door flew open the moment she saw Stein and Angie walking up the courtyard. “I solved it,” she exclaimed. “Do you want to hear?”

“Not right now, ok?” He tried not to break stride.

“I changed the Morty Greene character to a woman. But everything else is the same.”

“She’s a six foot nine inch woman?”

“You are so linear. Do you want to know why the bottles get stolen?”

“Yes, but later.”

He fumbled to find the right key.

“The shampoo is just incidental. It’s the bottles! This is the packaging generation. As long as people think they have Espe, that’s all that matters.”

He got the door open and pointedly prevented Penelope from coming in. “Later, ok?”

Angie dumped her backpack and jacket over Stein’s desk and tromped into the kitchen. “How come there’s never any food here?” she peered disdainfully into the refrigerator.

“There’s cheese, there’s apples. I got Fujis, the kind you like. There’s bread. There’s pasta. We have to talk.”

“I like Galas, not Fujis.”

“Last time I got Galas; you told me you wanted Fujis.”

“No. Last time you got Fujis.”

“What’s the difference? They all taste good when you have the munchies.”

Everything stopped for a moment. He had taken her by surprise. And himself even more. There was no retreating now.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked with hostile nonchalance.

“It means I found your stash.”

Her face went through the gamut of adolescent response. From shock through denial and outrage, to defiant attack. “That’s a real invasion of privacy. Going through my things.”

“The air duct is not your things.”

“It’s not even mine anyway. I’m holding it for someone.”

“Oh, that’s original.”

“Believe what you want.”

“What I want is the truth.”

“No, what you want is some kind of parental fantasy.”

“How’d you even get it in there? That shelf weighs a ton.”

“You see? That proves it’s not mine. And what were you doing anyway, prowling around the-?”