Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Looks like somebody made a mess,’ he says.

There’s a spray of black dirt on the siding by the front door.

Lama looks up. My eyes follow.

‘Geeze — somebody really nailed it,’ he says.

There, under the ceiling of the portico, ten feet up, is a single security camera, aimed down at the entrance, its lens caked with dirt, its plastic outer case cracked like an egg.

He smiles. Jimmy Lama’s giving me a message — that a picture is worth a ream of words.

‘Uncle Paul.’

Danny Vega is waiting for me at my house, a hangdog expression under the bill of a Giants cap. He is all elbows on knees, the architecture of youth, good for propping up chins when sitting, as he is now on my front porch.

It is nearly four in the morning, and he is about the last person I would expect to see.

‘Danny?’ I say.

He can read the question in my voice.

‘Baby-sitter said we could come over. I put my junk and the scooter in the garage,’ he says. He looks up at me, brown oval eyes. ‘It’s okay, isn’t it?’ He says this like maybe I’m going to throw him out into the street.

‘Sure,’ I say. I give him a smile, perhaps the only soft look he’s had from an adult in days.

I can see the little Vespa by my workbench, Danny’s way in the single-parent world. Next to it is a red helmet and a small daypack.

Laurel and I had given him the little motor scooter as a gift on his last birthday. Danny made a small wooden box that fits neatly on the back where, under hasp and lock, he keeps the mystical items that capture the fancy of a fifteen-year-old.

‘Where’s your mother? Why didn’t she drive you?’

He humps his shoulders and shakes his head, as much as forearms will allow.

‘Thought she might be with you,’ he says. Danny hasn’t got a clue where Laurel is.

Chills course through my body, a combination of sleep deprivation and thoughts of where Laurel might be at this hour.

None of this seems to concern Danny. He is glum in the way teenagers often are. Little would excite him short of nuclear attack, and that only because of its brilliant flashes. Despite a desperate home situation, his expression is a map of feckless innocence.

He often seems to be transmitting on a different frequency. In his moments of deepest musing you could lose your ass wagering on what was coursing through that mind. In any conversation it can take half a day to figure what he is talking about, and if you took ten guesses you would no doubt be wrong in nine. The kid is in an adolescent daze, trapped somewhere between puberty and the twilight zone.

Danny looks nothing like Jack. Coloring and eyes, around the mouth, he is his mother’s boy. While Danny has noticed, he has yet to undertake any serious forays beyond the gender gulf. He has no serious friends of the fairer persuasion, though I have seen a few girls bat their eyes his way, lashes like Venus fly-traps. In his own way, while not effeminate, Danny was prettier than they were. The gyrations of MTV seem to hold no apparent allure. I have never seen him out-of-doors without a baseball cap, worn to the ears in the image of idols on trading cards from the fifties. By all appearances he has avoided the social disorder of American youth, the affliction of ‘cool.’ But he has paid a price. Danny suffers the immutable pain of not being one of the guys. His single attempt at socialization, a ride in a boosted buggy with the boys, was powered by peer pressures more combustible than anything in an engine block. And it ended with a sputtering backfire, in the glare of a flashing light bar and the harsh words of a father who for much of Danny’s life was absent. All things considered, I think Danny Vega would have been happier had he been born on a farm in a verdant field — sometime in the last century.

‘She said you went over to Dad’s, that something happened.’ The ‘she’ he is talking about I assume is Mrs. Bailey, who’s been fielding my phone. Danny is a lexicon of disjointed thoughts.

‘Julie’s inside.’ He offers this up without my asking.

‘I think she’s asleep,’ he says.

He doesn’t ask what happened at his father’s. Instead he’s off again on another wavelength, something about wax and a model he has to make, a project for school, he says.

I do a double take at four in the morning. Wax.

‘Your aunt used to use some for canning. I think there might be some in the garage,’ I say. ‘Can it wait till morning?’ I give him a large yawn.

‘Okay.’

‘When did you see your mom last?’

He makes a face, thinking back. ‘Three — or so. Maybe it was four.’

To Danny time is a fungible commodity. Like grain or pork bellies, any hour of the day can be traded for any other. He doesn’t own a watch.

‘She went out, said she’d be back.’

I give him a look, like — ‘And?’

‘She never showed up.’

This is not a usual occurrence, the reason the boy is here.

Laurel may be many things, but she is not a dilettante mother. Her few wayward evenings turned into early dawn, like the escapade with her confessor, I can count almost on the hairs of my palm. These infrequent lapses have occurred only when the kids were safely elsewhere. Laurel is not one to subject her children to the odious intrusion of quick alcoholic lovers or fortnight Lotharios.

I ask Danny if he’s eaten.

‘Some Froot Loops and a banana.’

‘You hungry?’ I ask

‘Sure.’

I wave him on into the house and forage in the cupboards of the kitchen for some crackers and a can of soup. These days I am not exactly a dietitian’s wet dream.

Mrs. Bailey has fallen asleep on my front room couch. I can see her through the open door of the kitchen, and feel the rattle of her snoring on the floorboards.

‘Where were you tonight? I called the house earlier, nobody answered.’ I put the can in the opener. It twirls like a carousel until the lid collapses.

He rolls his eyes, gives me a kind of dumb-kid smile.

‘Julie asked me to go over to a friend’s. She uses me,’ he says, ‘like for wheels. It’s not that I mind,’ he says. But I can tell he’s embarrassed, performing shuttle duties for his sister, who is two years younger, to her boyfriend’s house. Unlike her brother, Julie’s social plane is pressurized, and designed to fly in the stratosphere. She dates boys older than Danny, guys who think nothing of calling her at ten to have her over at eleven.

Julie is a honey-blonde, with blue eyes, good bones, and a feminine form that is ripening faster than her ability to reason. She is learning all too quickly that good looks, rather than good works, can often get you what you want.

The downsides, the temptations of excess and the price to be paid, still elude the telemetry of her radar. At thirteen she is the sexual equivalent of a toddler with a nuclear warhead. Were I Julie’s father, I would have my broker investing heavily in a nunnery.

I put the soup in front of Danny, no ladle, just a bowl, microwave hot. I draw up a chair across from him at the table.

‘There’s something I have to talk to you about.’

He’s spooning it down, looking up at me with doelike eyes. His cap is politely off, on the table next to his dish with crackers.

‘There was an accident tonight at your dad’s house. A bad accident. A shooting,’ I say.

He takes the spoon away from his mouth, and still holding it, rests forearm and utensil on the table. The spoon is shaking at its tip.

‘Is my dad all right?’ He’s looking at me wide-eyed.

With all the anguish of an open custody battle, and Jack’s short temper with the boy, Danny still cares about his father.

‘Your dad’s fine.’