Hollywood Ending (5 page)

The next day under a blistering hot sun I relayed my plan to Benji. We stood in the middle of the oval watching our classmates play baseball. Mr Barrett always sent the worst players as far away from the diamond as possible, where there was nothing to do but run after balls hit so far out that it didn't matter how slowly we threw them back. I was more than happy with this arrangement.

I sat on the grass, patted the ground next to me, and Benji reluctantly sauntered over, squatting beside me amongst the dandelions. We didn't say anything, just watched the players run in circles and picked at the flowers. Then Benji started to scratch at his face. Under the sun his pale skin was turning lobster red.

Someone hit a ball out of field and everyone cheered. The boys ran to the fence and started climbing it. Mr Barrett chased from behind and yelled at them to get down.

‘That was horrible yesterday,' I said to Benji. ‘You know, what happened to that cat.'

He waited, and for a while I thought he wasn't going to say anything. Then he spoke.

‘I have a cat,' he said. ‘Freddie Prinze.'

‘Freddie Prinze? That actor? The one who killed himself?'

Benji nodded. A loud
chock
sound echoed across the field and another ball sailed over our heads. Neither of us made any attempt to get up. Mr Barrett yelled in our direction. I gave him a wave and, defeated, he went to get another ball from his gym bag. Benji laughed. He tore at the dandelions in the ground and crushed them between his fingers.

‘I hate Mr Barrett,' he said, his voice cold. ‘He deserves a bullet in the head.'

‘Teachers like him make you understand why Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did what they did,' I replied, not even thinking before the words tumbled out. ‘Columbine wasn't a very nice place to begin with, from what I've heard. I mean, killers aren't made in a vacuum, you know? I'm not saying what they did was right. It wasn't. I just hate how people call them evil and don't think about why they did it.'

I didn't know whether he was going to call me a lunatic or crazy for sympathising with the Columbine killers.

‘Columbine had a history of bullying and repression,' he said as if reciting from a textbook. ‘The teachers had established a hierarchy that kept the jocks at the top, and everyone else on the bottom. What they did—Dylan and Eric—was a political act, like in the French revolution.'

I was stunned, and kind of relieved. I had never heard anyone say something like that about Columbine. My Aunt Lynette always said the world was a better place now that ‘those sociopathic monsters' had blown their own heads off.

‘This place is just as bad,' Benji continued. ‘Nothing but a bunch of jocks and cheerleaders.'

I thought again of the cat baking in its metal coffin. ‘Would you be interested in coming on an expedition?' I asked.

Benji looked suspicious. ‘What kind of expedition?'

‘I'm going to help the cat that got hit by the car,' I said. ‘I'm going to save it.'

‘How can you save it? It's dead.'

This was true. Still, I believed that dead things were not beyond dignity. And
I
was alive, and could do something about it. The whole incident had made me feel indescribably dirty, like a rubbernecker at the site of a car crash. I wanted nothing more than to get clean.

‘Are you in or are you out?' I asked. Benji looked across at his classmates, all the jocks and princesses and people we would never be like.

‘I guess I'll help you,' he muttered, as if he were doing me an enormous favour. ‘There's nothing on TV tonight anyway. '

Benji met me at the dumpster after class. We waited until the other students had left and the school was deserted. The dumpster was hot to touch, but luckily the handles had been in the shadow of the towering oaks above it. I took this as a sign that the natural world was pleased with my plan, that it too knew the importance of setting things right.

If Benji was nervous he didn't show it. As I struggled to lift the side of the lid, he took the other end without being asked, and together we hoisted the dumpster open and let the top bang noisily against the classroom wall. Immediately we smelt the cat, a cloying, decaying stench that slapped our faces. I covered my mouth with my hand. Benji heaved himself over the side and stuck his head in.

‘I can see it,' he yelled. ‘Its paw's sticking out of the bag. I'm going in.'

He threw his legs over and disappeared into the darkness. I waited in the cool breeze until the garbage bag appeared over the side, wet and torn, fur poking from a hole. I took the bag from Benji and gently laid it on the ground, trying not to look at the contents. Benji vaulted over the side of the dumpster and landed with a thud in the dirt.

‘Careful,' I said as he steadied himself inches from the bag. ‘You nearly jumped on it.'

‘My cousin accidentally jumped on a puppy once. He was on the top of his bunk bed and the puppy was on the floor and he didn't see it. He landed right on its stomach and its guts came out of its mouth.'

‘Benji! That's horrible.'

He frowned. ‘Well, it happened. Just 'cause you don't wanna hear about bad stuff doesn't mean it doesn't happen.'

I knelt and opened the bag carefully, sticking my hand inside. The cat's head lolled out, limp and lifeless. I jumped back and shrieked.

‘Geez, what a girl,' Benji said. ‘Give it to me.'

He pushed me aside and crouched over the cat, lifting the head gently. Its eyes were closed and it looked peaceful, like it was asleep. I'd had nightmares about its eyes being open, and was terrified that if I tore apart the bag it would be staring at me. Benji felt around its neck for a collar and discovered a small blue nametag.

‘Oscar,' he read. ‘Twelve Paige Street.'

We spoke little as we walked, the cat in the bag swinging between us. I started to feel like I worked for the government, and was going to tell someone that their son had died at war. We arrived at the address to find a cosy little bungalow with a small front yard and no fence. As we walked up the path to the front door my heart sank. On the stairs was a plastic water dish, kitty litter and a ceramic food bowl, some tuna still in it. I rang the bell. The door opened and a young woman stood in front of us, a friendly smile on her face.

‘Yes?' she said politely. ‘Can I help you?'

‘Do you have a cat called Oscar?' I asked.

‘Sure do. Didn't come home last night. Don't tell me he's been pestering you for food? He's such a cheeky boy.'

I handed her the bag. I explained how Oscar had been hit by a car, and told her he had not suffered.

The woman cried but she was brave and tried to hide her tears by smiling through them. She stepped forward and hugged me, then Benji, who cringed.

‘You are both such good kids,' she said. ‘Good kids. Thank you so much for bringing home my baby.'

She closed the door, and Benji and I started the long walk home. I didn't feel like a good kid. I knew we had done the right thing, but something was niggling inside, a worm burrowing its way through my core. I hated to admit how exciting it had been to stand outside that dumpster, breathing the fetid stench of the cat's remains. The smell was familiar, comforting, like something I'd lost but never knew I had in the first place.

It could have been my imagination but I was sure Benji had lingered a while in the darkness of that dumpster, taking his time before returning to the fading sunlight of the afternoon. I watched him as we walked together. He was immersed in thought, staring at his sneakers as they hit the pavement. Like archaeologists excavating a tomb, Benji and I had crossed over an unspoken boundary, and emerged forever changed by the experience. He looked at me, eyes ablaze, and somewhere a dog howled in the distance. I knew I had found a kindred spirit.

FIVE

After saying goodbye to Mrs Connor, I left their house and made my way home. The warm air coupled with the start of summer vacation had brought people out of their houses. Across the road a couple walked a teacup poodle on a thin lead. A group of kids skated past me, the wheels of their boards making a long, rolling sound like an incoming wave, building to a crescendo then disappearing as they sped away into the shadows.

My mind wandered. I looked into the windows of houses, some dark, others illuminated by the light of television sets. I thought about the Manson Family. On nights like this they would go out and do what they called a ‘creepy crawly'. A group of four or five Family members would target a house entirely at random, break in and proceed to ‘creep' around the place. The idea was to move around the house unnoticed, making sure they didn't wake the occupants. Occasionally they would take something, like cash if it was left lying around, or food to feed the Family back at the ranch. But it was more about moving around undetected, the excitement and power that came with infiltrating someone's house as they slept.

Richard Ramirez—the ‘Night Stalker'—was one of Los Angeles's most infamous serial killers, and also favoured neighbourhoods like this. The neatly trimmed hedges and manicured front lawns were a far cry from the bleakness and despair of downtown Los Angeles, where he regularly scored drugs at the bus terminus and slept in whatever car he had stolen at the time. The suburbs made the Night Stalker angry, just like they did the Manson Family. The warm little houses in tidy rows were a reminder of every comfort he didn't have. The order of suburbia affronted his need for chaos.

Aunt Lynette's house was a California bungalow with a large front yard and an old-fashioned porch. The light was on in the living room and I could see Lynette bent over her books, a glass of red wine in her hand. From a distance she looked just like my mother, with her hair hanging loose and those thick-rimmed glasses. It wasn't until you got closer that her features became her own. Green eyes instead of brown. A mole on her chin where my mother had none. From a distance I could imagine it was my mother, and for a brief moment everything was as it used to be. But the closer I got the more reality came crashing back.

Aunt Lynette and I were always being mistaken for mother and daughter, something that made us both equally uncomfortable. It was easier not to correct people as that would involve going into details, which neither of us wanted to do. But there was no denying the family resemblance. The same round face, the same large, Kewpie-doll eyes. I didn't get much from my dad's side of the family, except a healthy suspicion of authority that my teachers liked to call an ‘attitude problem'.

Aunt Lynette was an assistant District Attorney. She prosecuted people on behalf of the county, regardless of whether she thought they were guilty or not. This didn't seem to bother her. She'd worked hard all her life to make it this far, and whether clients were guilty or not was largely irrelevant to her career. She had prosecuted battered wives and mothers, and sent innocent men to jail. But still she slept well at night. All that seemed to matter to her was that she was doing her job effectively.

Lynette also had the alarming habit of flashing her DA badge. Once when I was nine she took me to Disneyland, and two guys got into an argument in the line at Splash Mountain. She pushed through the crowd, walked straight up to them, flipped open her little leather wallet and watched the blood drain from their faces. No one even looked closely enough at her badge to see that an assistant DA wasn't actually a real cop. The two men held up their hands and stepped back as if she was going to taser them, or perhaps cuff them to the fence where they'd have to listen to ‘Zipadeedodah' all day long. I remember being mortified and hiding behind a corn dog stand as everybody stared at us. Lynette wasn't fazed by the attention. She was proud of working for the county.

As I walked in the front door she looked up from her casebooks. Next to her on the dining table were two plates, one stacked high with some kind of casserole, the other scraped empty.

‘I've already eaten,' I said as I kicked off my shoes. Lynette looked at the casserole, brown and congealing on her fine china. I watched her swallow her anger.

‘Maybe we should get you a cell phone,' she suggested, ‘so I can call and check whether you actually want dinner or if I'm going to all this trouble for no good reason.'

‘Cell phones give you cancer,' I said, ‘and the government use them to track your movements.'

‘That sounds like something your father would say,' she said, a comment I chose to ignore.

‘So what exactly did you and Benji get up to today?'

‘Just stuff.'

‘Oh really?' She put her pen down. ‘What kind of stuff?'

I opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk. ‘Went to Universal Studios, took the tram tour. Can I take this?'

She didn't say anything, just nodded then looked down at her books. ‘I saw the most horrible thing on Oprah today.'

‘Hmmm?'

‘They had a story about a woman whose car was stolen and her baby was still in the backseat. She tried to grab the baby but the car sped off, her child still hanging out, attached to the car seat. She watched her child being dragged along the side of the road.'

‘That's a repeat.'

Lynette pursed her lips. ‘Stories like that make you put your life in perspective,' she continued. ‘Makes you realise how lucky you really are.'

‘Just another day for you and me in paradise.'

She examined me through her thick black lenses. ‘Have you done something to your hair?'

‘It's pink.'

‘So it is. Do you like it?'

‘I just love it.'

‘Good. As long as you're happy.'

I leant over her casebooks. ‘What are you working on?'

‘It's a murder case,' she said as she scribbled something on her notepad. ‘It's gang-related.'

‘Cool. Got any crime scene photos?'