Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Back in the bus, the kids groused about lunch. Then Dézhiree announced the big surprise: they were all invited by the Scream man for McDonald’s at his production office. That was particularly good news for Kristl, who had planned to run away during the tour but had found the edifice escape-proof.

When they pulled in front of the nondescript Ventura Boulevard building, bushy-tailed film interns — fresh-scrubbed models of compassion — awaited curbside to usher them in. Upstairs, a morbid display of props from his films vied with the Getty’s chamber of horrors, but the one that riveted them stood eerily alone in its Plexiglas showcase: a burn-scarred, rubbery hand with long razors at the end of its fingers. The Scream man’s partner (a gracious, dimpled woman, who looked more like Ava Gardner than she did the Flying Nun), led the children to a conference room, where burgers, Cokes and fries sat in the middle of a huge granite table. They dove in.

The startling thing — at least to Amaryllis — was how without much ado she suddenly found herself in the shimmery, baking sunshine of the Valley sprinting by storefronts, doglegging around Vendome and Blockbuster and Nail Time and Pick Up Stix, in this store and out the other — Pier 1, Bookstar, Strouds, Kinko’s, Koo Koo Roo — zigzagging Kristl covering their trail as they forded streets wider and busier than any Amaryllis had ever known: through drugstores bright as the blinding midday sun, past delicatessens and savings & loans and marinating trash bins and ticketing policemen and old folks on their last legs, and heatstroked beggars on bus benches, until they walked miles and miles, the damp white-yellow knob of Amaryllis’s wrist bone stinging from her indomitable friend’s iron grip.

Finally, Kristl made a pleading call that did not look to be going well, at least not until she read the address off the pay phone to whoever was on the other end. She hung up and said her mom was coming and that was good, because the police would soon be “siccing dogs” on them. She said bloodhounds used their long ears to stir up the soil for the scent of whatever they were tracking.

The girls went to Rite Aid and busied themselves for what seemed like hours. They stole cough syrup and looked at all the makeup and perfume and laughed uncontrollably when they found an aisle that sold diapers for grown-ups. Then Kristl said they should leave, because a clerk was looking at them funny and probably thought they were going to shoplift, which of course they already had. So they went back into the deaf-and-dumb heat, walking in circles with their bad b.o.

A tattooed man roared up on a motorcycle and the girls backed off until Kristl recognized him — it was Mike. She screamed and threw her arms around him. She asked where her mom was and Mike said she had to stay in Lawndale, but he was going to take her to Topanga and Tina would come later. He handed Kristl a helmet and told her to get on. She said she wouldn’t without her friend, and Mike said they would have to come back for Amaryllis in a regular car. Kristl said she wouldn’t go without her friend, but Mike said she better if she didn’t want him to drive her ass back to MacLaren right now. Kristl made Mike promise they’d come back in a car, and she told Amaryllis to meet them at the dumpster behind Vons and that she should hide until they came. She put on her helmet and they roared off, practically splitting the orphan’s eardrums.

Feeling sorry for herself and queasy about her betrayal of Dézhiree, Amaryllis begins to cry but stops quickly enough, not wishing to draw attention. Her progress now becomes hurly-burly, scattershot, vaudevillian: in any given broiling locale, she stands weirdly stock-still, flustered; then, realizing she is making a spectacle of herself, moves on with a jerk as if given the Hook. Nowhere to go … so she sticks to the impossibly long alley with dumpsters all around — blue for merchants, green for residences, brown for construction debris (these, big as trucks), gray for storage, yellow for recycling — dodging them as they close in on her like the living boulders she saw on an archaic Star Trek . Each path of escape seems the one that will end in Carceration — in the Valley, just like her father …

Amaryllis wheels pell-mell through humid air, her orbit in decay, instinctively gravitating toward places where children gather, but children are the worst bloodhounds of all, and they point and whisper at the sweaty loser until she gets the Hook again, and tears across the street like a lost panicked dog, through entries of stores perceived to have rear exits; as she passes through each garishly lit refuge the air-conditioning cools her body, though is not a comfort. Plunged again into the bustle of tarry parking lots, parking lots like cities, parking lots with whole populations, rhythms, moods and laws. She slows until standing stock-still, dazed and vacant in the warpy heat, staving off tears, no longer thinking of the babies or her mother (diseased) or her father (carcerated) or Topsy or Kristl or Dézhiree or anything —starving, yet without a single thought of food, and shamefully peeing in the brush behind Vons, where the bluest dumpster is, at a break in the bushes that leads to a slow-moving river in a concrete bed upon whose ceasing current she would most certainly not be borne back to the past. She squats and does her business, old breast wound aching again, tears like blisters on her cheeks, thinking of Pixies as she hikes up her pants — they’d be having dinner now and talking about her (though maybe not). The lonely Box of Saints tucked in a drawer, waiting …

She continues her locomotion to the redundant oasis of Moorpark Park, but the grown-ups notice when she sits on the bright orange slide for a while — then off again, ashamed and horrified that she left her post and might miss her ride as nightfall comes.

There she is! There! There! There!”

Headlamps light her up. Amaryllis stirs, half asleep in the bushes behind the blue dumpster, on the lip of the hillock that dips down to the river. Kristl is grabbing at her, and suddenly she finds herself in the enormous, slippery backseat of an old El Dorado. There’s even a pillow back there and a chewed-up dog bone on the carpet.

“We kept looking for you. My mom was gonna leave!”

Tina is at the wheel. Her long, squeezed-together face reminds Amaryllis of the Scream masks, but more pretty than scary.

“This is so fucked-up, Kristl Ann! Honey, I am on parole .”

“But she’s my friend —”

“You can never say I picked up this girl, Kristl Ann, never .” She turned back to Amaryllis. “You can never say I did this, OK? Because that’s kidnapping!” To her daughter: “I’ll tell you one thing, she is going back tomorrow .”

“Mom!—”

“And you are, too—”

“You can’t!”

“Well that’s just the way it’s going to be!”

Kristl started to talk, but her mother said, “Shut up!” and they drove in silence along Ventura Boulevard until rattling onto the 101. Once they were on the freeway, Tina got calmer but yelled more.

“Do you even know what they’ll do to your mother if they stop me with the two of you? Throw me in jail , that’s what. That’s right. And jail is not a place I want to be, huh -uh. Been there done that no way.”

“I’m sorry— ”

“We can’t even go back to Lawndale . I can’t even put you with your grandma — she’s too sick. Though I may have to … don’t you think I’m the first one they will call? Huh? Don’t you know that? Well, you’re fucking right. Probably called already . I may be in violation just by not checking the messages! And Grandma? Would you really want to do that to your grandma? Would you, Kristl Ann? She’d call the cops on you for sure —you know Grandma don’t put up with no shit. And why should she? That’s why we’re gonna be with Mike in Topanga. We can’t go back home! I can’t believe I’m out here in the dark with you two fugitives on my way to fucking Topanga! I had to break away from business to come get your friend. I’m getting my real estate license, did you know that?”