Five Years Ago: Part 1 3 page

In truth, Mina went to some trouble to find a kid when she decided she wanted one. She knew she didn’t have the patience for a squalling, shitting, diapered blob, so she had her lawyers fan out and search for something more to her liking. Something cute and endearing, something that knew how to wipe its own ass and didn’t have any nearby family who might object to creative legalities. Something like a little boy who had already spent years in a system filled with crooked bureaucrats who would gladly face the other way if it meant a they could cuddle an armful of crisp green paper.

Something exactly like me.

I don’t mean to sound bitter or to make it sound like Mina Savage was a horrible woman. I’m not bitter and she wasn’t horrible. Careless, self-absorbed and perennially confused, but terrible? No.

She was the daughter and granddaughter of legends, born into the fishbowl of fame and privilege. Maybe that burden alone had fucked her up at an early age.

Mina was beautiful, stunning. Men were easily captivated by her looks and her name. They had to get a lot closer before they realized that beneath all that auburn-haired glamor was a messy patchwork of scars, despair and addiction. Mina had already been discarded by three husbands who were glad enough to open up their checkbooks and purchase their freedom.

Shortly after I was swept into her care we left the country. We didn’t return for over a decade.

Those years were pretty good for me; a sequence of posh boarding schools and fantastic adventures throughout old Europe. Americans always seemed to be everywhere so it was easy to believe we were in some floating version of our homeland.

Believe it or not, failed politicians, woeful ex-movie stars and a packs of disgraced corporate elites tend to run amok in international lands. Think of it as a contemporary version of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.

Still, I remain grateful to Mina for paying attention to my education, even though she seemed to forget my existence for large swaths of time. Whether she’d stashed me in the picturesque Alps or deep in the fabled moors of Yorkshire, I could always count on her to eventually show up in a perfumed cloud and rediscover her motherhood.

I remember being happy to see her. Happy, even though I knew I’d be yanked from yet another cozy situation and taken on a frenetic holiday until Mina found a different cure for her loneliness. Then she would deposit me in another luxurious setting thickly populated with more American castoff kids.

Mina was a hell of a parent when she made the effort. After all, it was Mina who showed me the Ufizzi and the Louvre, Mina who photographed me standing proudly in front of the Colosseum, and Mina who arranged for a tour of the caves of France’s Dordogne region when I mentioned learning all about the Lascaux cave in school.

She didn’t talk about her family, the Savages. Movie stars and sad stories. All I ever knew of them were the things I had read. The fact that I had aunts, uncles and cousins seemed irrelevant. It didn’t occur to me to want to be around them. In fact I didn’t give them much thought at all until Mina, bedraggled and exhausted from another heartbreak, dragged me out of a converted castle in the Scottish Highlands and announced we were going ‘home’.

I can remember objecting, sputtering something like “Shit, now? Really? I’ll be a senior.”

But when Mina got an idea into her head – adopting a kid, marrying a sheik, dragging a teenager back to the Home of the Brave – there was no getting rid of it.

I found myself riding over an ocean in the private plane belonging to one of Mina’s old friends as I moodily destroyed tins of caviar and pouted about the fact that I’d been this fucking close to porking the new girl in school, a Russian beauty distantly related to some royal family that’d been shot a hundred years ago in Siberia.

Everything was different that time. But I didn’t realize it until Mina left me on her brother’s doorstep somewhere in the Arizona desert and then ducked back into the luxury Town Car for the ride to Scottsdale’s finest rehab facility.

Two months later I learned the hard way that Mina’s failures were much worse than I’d ever suspected.

“Oz?” calls Brock and he’s got the Concerned Friend grimace on his face again.

I realize that I’ve been nervously clicking a pen while my thoughts strayed. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about Mina over the past five years. She was a fickle woman with her own set of demons. There’s not much point in trying to understand her now.

“I need to get on the road.” I reluctantly set the pen down on Brock’s desk.

If I push it I can reach western Arizona in two days. Surely they’re all there already. Surely she’s there already. Gary had assured me she would be, even though I hadn’t asked, not specifically, not about her. Like I said, Gary must know a few things already. He wouldn’t have called me in the first place if he didn’t.

After bending down and giving Brock an awkward man-hug in his wheelchair, I notice that he’s staring at me with a worried frown.

“You remember who you are, Oz-man” he says, nodding. “Don’t let them edit you into something else.”

“I will. And I won’t.”

Flimsy promises. I don’t give a god almighty fuck what they do with the footage. They could cast me as King Kong With Testicular Scabies and it would bother me as much as a paper cut.

There’s only one good reason in the world for me to go down this road. One. And I don’t even know whether she wants anything to do with me. Or if she’s even worth the trouble at this point.

Shit.

First love.

Only love.

A strange and turbulent summer that was the best and worst part of my life.

I keep the windows wide open in the pickup as I slowly thread my way down through the cool greenery of the mountain roads. I appreciate it all; the fresh wisps of summer, the fluttering hands of the forest.

Where I’m going will be much hotter, much harsher. There’s no place to fucking hide there.

Thinking about her, even the most fleeting of memories, tends to lengthen my dick. That’s no way to start a long road trip. So instead I think about the long, wandering years since then; a thousand adventures and disasters that blur together and are all equally trivial.

No good. Today it all leads back to her. After all, nobody who spends twenty-three years on this earth is a blank slate. We are the sum of our pains and trials, joys and heartaches. It’s impossible to guess them all. And to really understand anything about what’s happening today you have to go backwards first.

You have to understand what happened five years ago….

CHAPTER FIVE

Five Years Ago: Part 1

Almost as soon as they land in New York they are leaving.

The woman surrounds herself with people who are paid to tend to her belongings, offer her drinks, escort her to the decadent lounge where the wealthy are not required to mingle with ordinary people. She is agitated, clawing at the inside of her palms with her fingernails, as is her habit when the universe has gone out of order.

Oscar suspects the city has bad memories for her. His mother is a collector of bad memories. They are finally overcrowding her mind.

He is disappointed to be leaving so soon. He knew this place once, New York. This was where he lived, although he remembers little about it except bad smells and cold alleys. He looks out the windows and sees nothing of beauty; only the industrial background of a major international airport. It manages to look ugly even in the balmy spell of early summer. But he had glimpsed the legendary skyline as the plane descended and badly wanted to see it up close. Briefly he considers leaving the woman here and disappearing into the throngs of weary travelers.

“Oscar,” the woman croaks and holds out a thin hand to him as a weak smile tries to take custody of her face.

Much of the time she forgets he exists but now she would like him to sit beside her. He sinks into a plush armchair and tries not to look at her face. It’s cracked and drawn, a face of pain, a face that seems even more ugly because for so long it was beautiful.

He decides he must be a complete asshole for even noticing these things.

Oscar searches for things to say to his mother. They should have things to say to one another. But she’s fretful and distracted. Anyway, his mind keeps going in odd directions, thinking about the strangeness of being in his own country again. Then he starts thinking about the girls he knew from his latest school. Some were girlfriends for brief stretches of angst-filled time. Others were just dirty hookups. Oscar doesn’t miss any of them. But he idly catalogues them in his mind because it’s something to do while he sits beside a ruined woman, waiting for their plane to refuel.

“You’ll enjoy being there,” says Oscar’s mother as she rubs at her temples and then slides her large sunglasses back onto her thin face. She has acquired a curious, affected accent from all her years of travel. Oscar has no such accent. He’s convinced hers is deliberate.

She smiles at him again and he sees his distorted reflection in her dark lenses. “I loved Atlantis as a child. My father filmed seven movies there. You’ve seen them, haven’t you, his movies? Yes, I’m sure I showed them to you. When he bought the place he decided to live there part time and had a house built. None of the artificial buildings they added to the set could tame that wild beauty, just as it couldn’t tame your grandfather. I wish you’d known Rex. He was a king. He was…”

Oscar’s mother loses her train of thought as she stares off into the past. Her lip quivers. Oscar reaches for her arm. He knows something is wrong with her, something much worse than what’s usually wrong with her. It seems as if she is decaying into the folds of her Chanel pantsuit.

She shakes off the gloom, pats his hand and smiles another terrible smile. Her voice is a tuneless singsong. “It’s so perfect that August moved the children out there. It’s a magical place for children. I’m glad he remembers that. You will see, Oscar.”

Oscar has only a vague idea what’s she’s talking about. His adopted mother, Mina, is a Savage. Oscar knows that when he mentions this fact to other Americans they will usually understand what he means. Mina was never an actress though. She never did much at all except frolic with rich, abusive men and impulsively adopt a child. The Savages were a legendary Hollywood family, although they’ve been cursed by scandal and heartbreak for decades. Oscar has never met any of them. They don’t even really matter to him.

But now he is caught up in Mina’s latest odyssey. They will be flying to Arizona, to the old film ranch in the desert that was Mina’s childhood paradise. Mina apparently plans for them to remain there for some time, in the place where her brother’s family lives.

Oscar objects to it all, but only in silence. He’s not a child for fuck’s sake. He’s a month past his seventeenth birthday and capable as any man. Usually if bullshit even comes sniffing in his direction he smacks it back with two mighty fists. And this is major bullshit, this bizarre trek to another continent, to a lost era.

He could easily have scoffed at Mina and refused her pleas when she made her announcement two days ago in the bleak confines of the headmaster’s office. She wouldn’t have known what to do if he had.

“Oscar! We are going home! Back to America. You will meet your cousins!”

Home?

America?

Cousins?

These concepts are all strange to him. The headmaster did nothing to dissuade Mina. He was apparently tired of dealing with the parade of heartbroken girls that the charismatic Oscar Savage left in his wake wherever he walked.

Mina had always seemed to hate America. How many times had she insisted to Oscar that the whole nation was nothing but a cauldron of scandal, gossip, and narcissism? Oscar didn’t exactly believe that was true. Mina assumes the world of cutthroat celebrities is universal; that it exists in Pocatello, Idaho in the exact same form as it is exists in Beverly Hills.

Oscar could have dug his heels into European soil and refused to leave. Mina would not have known how to force him. But he didn’t have the heart to refuse her. No matter how careless of a mother she was, she was the only one he had. He could tell immediately that she was sick. He still didn’t know whether it was mental or physical, but she needed him. So Oscar quietly, if resentfully, packed his things and followed his mother out of the Scottish countryside.

Tentatively, Oscar asks if they might remain in New York for a short time but Mina wearily reminds him that their posh traveling arrangements are the result of a favor that is nearly at an end. She will not consider a commercial flight. Moreover, her brother is expecting her out in Arizona. His entire family is expecting her, expecting both of them. According to Mina these Savage people are overjoyed at the prospect of finally meeting a long lost cousin. Oscar thinks about that and pictures them; a herd of displaced socialites squatting in the desert dust and clutching designer bags as their flawless faces expectantly scan the sky.

The flight to Phoenix takes five hours. Oscar looks down into the wide expanse of his country. From the air it appears largely unpopulated. Every once in a while there will be a flash of metal in the sunlight, a hint at a pocket of humanity. They fly over interminable brown mountains that give way to a wide valley. It is a riot of beige neighborhoods riddled with aqua-colored dots that Oscar figures are swimming pools. It looks nothing like the place Mina described.

There is a car waiting, of course. On the ground, Phoenix is a maze of concrete and asphalt that shimmers in the heat. Soon the city gives way to sprawling residential stucco in various shades of taupe. Finally, the long stretch of suburbia ends and they are careening through a cactus-riddled landscape ringed by distant brown mountains.

Oscar grows uneasy as they turn off the freeway and spend miles on a bumpy road that dissolves into dirt. Mina has passed out beside him and the driver is nothing but a silent head.

“Shit,” Oscar mutters, and by the time they reach a scattered collection of buildings he’s expecting the worst.

Oscar slides out of the door as Mina struggles to pull herself back into the land of the conscious. The brilliant sunshine is so harsh, nearly painful.

He curses again and rubs his eyes, seeing spots and beyond that, an imprint of a ghost town. When he opens them, a girl has materialized. She looks him up and down with a bored expression, then tosses a mane of wavy dark hair. Oscar figures she’s one of the Savage cousins. She looks about as friendly as your average fork-tongued lizard.

Twenty yards away is a rambling, one story, rustically luxurious ranch home that was probably once quite something but now just looks like it’s seen better days. Beyond that is a splintery church, a rickety barn, a shabby general store with a teetering façade, and a narrow Victorian-style building with a sagging balcony and a wooden sign with the word ‘BROTHEL’ plainly spelled out in weathered lettering.

“Welcome to paradise, cousin,” laughs the girl who seconds earlier had looked at him like he was a shit-filled paper bag. Her face is pretty, her expression mocking and even though she’s not as filled out as the girls Oscar usually likes he can’t avoid taking interest in what he does see.

Then Mina spills out of the car and people suddenly start popping up from everywhere. The dark-haired girl is joined by a blonde and a redhead. Both of them stare at him and giggle like idiots. A teenage boy rides up on an arthritic pony and hops off, generating a cloud of dust. That pisses off a bigger teenage boy who has somehow erupted from the nearest cactus.

“Motherfucker,” complains the larger boy and swipes at the rider.

The kid on horseback tips his wide straw hat back and glares. “Stay off the fucking path then, asshole.”

A shoving match ensues and there’s more cursing, some shouted promises of blood. The pair of them roll right into Oscar’s legs.

The dark-haired girl lets out a loud sigh, then stomps over and pulls them apart. She’s petite and bird-like. Oscar stands ready to jump in if the boys make a move to rough her up at all but they freeze like a cartoon when she yells, “Stop acting like savages!”

The other two girls find this choice of words hilarious and they laugh harder. Oscar is beginning to wonder if they know how to do anything else.

With one final shove, the larger boy rolls off and stalks away without even hinting that he’s noticed Oscar at all despite the fact that he crashed right into him a few seconds earlier. The girl holds out a hand to the other boy, who’s grabbing at his hat and moodily shoving it back onto his head.

“Hell of an impression we’re making,” the girl says with a headshake as she hauls her brother to his feet. She meets Oscar’s eyes, stares searchingly for a second and then nods. Right away Oscar can guess that she’s the rare sort of girl who doesn’t have much patience for bullshit.

“I’m Ren.” She jerks her head. “This is Spence. The nasty ape stalking in the direction of the brothel is Monty. By the way, it’s not a real brothel so don’t get all excited. Like the rest of this place it’s just leftover garbage from the heyday of Hollywood’s revisionist Old West era.”

“Is that so?” says Oscar, trying to take it all in. The crumbling buildings, the gang of rowdy siblings, his mother somewhere in the background.

“Brother!” Mina squeals and kisses the air around the head of a broad-shouldered man whose movies Oscar has seen but whose hand he’s never shaken.

At the man’s side is a scowling woman with the same dainty build as Ren. Her face says she’s on the fading side of forty. She’s staring at Oscar.

“I thought he was a boy,” she complains unhappily. “You described a boy, not a man.”

The girl named Ren makes a face, rolling her eyes. Spence looks like he’d rather just get back on his horse and ride somewhere more interesting. The giggle twins go on giggling. Monty broods on the balcony of the brothel. And August Savage is scrutinizing him thoughtfully.

“Hello Oscar,” he says and it’s the friendliest greeting so far.

“Oscar is tall,” Mina explains as she slumps against the car with a sigh.

“You are tall,” August agrees. “How old are you now?”

“Sixteen,” Mina answers.

“Seventeen,” Oscar corrects.

“Ah,” nods August. “That explains it.”

The scowling woman grabs August’s arm and leads him to the far side of the car. Oscar can hear her hissing. He sees August’s hard glare in response.

“Enough,” says August and leaves her to glower alone as he returns to his sister’s side.

Mina looks uncomfortable as she stands in her brother’s shadow. When her absent gaze lands on Oscar it’s full of apology. This unnerves him.

Oscar looks around. This neglected collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere is not exactly the heaven that Mina remembers. Except for the Savage family it seems there is nothing and no one for miles. It doesn’t appear that will change anytime soon.

“Welcome to paradise.”

Now that he’s been introduced to a few of them, Oscar can figure out who the rest of the Savages are. The bitchy woman who perches atop her stilettos and regards Oscar like he’s a wild animal that’s just crapped in her roses is Lita, August’s wife, matriarch to the gang of wild teenagers. He knows that sullen Montgomery of the Brothel is the eldest, Loren who calls herself ‘Ren’ is next in line, then the twins Spencer and Ava. Finally Brigitte, who smirks at him through a curtain of red hair, is the youngest.

Atlantis Star looks like a place people might end up if they are running from zombie invasions or hellfire Armageddon. The end of the proverbial and literal road. Oscar wonders how long they’ve all been stuck out here and why the hell they came in the first place. It’s the opposite of glamorous.

August barks that Spencer needs to help Oscar with his bags. Spencer doesn’t seem pleased but he obeys after one more regretful glance at the waiting horse.

“Thanks, but I got it,” Oscar growls as he heaves two large duffel bags over each shoulder with a grunt. There was more that he’d left behind in the storage basement at school. He suspects he won’t ever see any of it again but that’s fine. He knows instinctively that he will never be returning and anyway he doesn’t need the burden of a whole mess of stuff.

In Oscar’s opinion that’s the biggest problem with people like his mother. Too much fucking stuff.

Atlantis, on the other hand, seems to have very little stuff. It’s a scorched ghost town in bleak condition. A rusted pickup truck sits in front of the house. Beside it is a silver Lexus.

Spence had shrugged and wandered back to his horse when Oscar refused his help but Ren falls in step beside him.

“You can’t walk out of here you know,” she says cheerfully. “Consequence is twenty miles away.”

Oscar stares at her, thinking she must be speaking in rural American slang terms that haven’t found their way across the ocean. “The consequences are twenty miles away?”

“Consequence. It’s a town. It has a traffic light and a gas station and a bunch of really unhappy people who barely move between May and October. That’s all there is in this area. At least it’s something though. I drive the girls out there to catch the school bus to Copper, which is another ten miles past that and the only high school between here and Phoenix. But at least it’s summer now so I don’t need to worry about it.”

“Shit, you serious?”

“Always.”

Oscar processes her words. “Why don’t you go to school with your sisters?”

Ren plays with the ends of her dark hair. “Online school. Spence does it too supposedly, although I damn well never him sitting down at the computer. We get shitty Wi-Fi out here by the way. A gust of wind knocks it out for an hour. Monty dropped out last year and spends most of his time stealing Dad’s old pickup so he can whore it up with whatever female is dumb enough to plant her face in his crotch.”

Oscar lets out a chuckle. The girl is weird, but there’s something innocently charming about her. “You sure don’t hold back, do you? Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

“Over there.” She points. “You’ll be staying at the little house right behind the brothel.”

“Words I didn’t expect to hear when I woke up this morning.”

“Ha! I’ll bet. The house was originally built for the caretaker or something. It’s where the boys sleep. Well, sort of. Spencer camps out in the desert half the time even though Lita keeps warning him that he’ll get his nuts chewed off by a Gila monster. And Monty just uses it as a fuck den so it might be kind of noisy in there. See that piece of crap in the foreground? We call it the brothel since it used to serve as either a saloon or a bordello, depending on what the script called for. Spence won’t be any trouble. But you tell me if Monty gives you shit and I’ll talk to him.”

Oscar glances up and sees Monty still scowling on the balcony of the brothel. The half rotted wood is completely bowed in the middle and Montgomery Savage seems to be tempting fate as he looms there with hulking menace. Oscar wonders if he’s aware of just how closely he resembles his grandfather and decides it’s probably something Monty’s been hearing his whole life. His dark eyes follow Oscar with a mute warning but other than that he doesn’t shift a muscle.

Oscar answers him back with a hard stare. It would be more effective if he wasn’t twisting his neck to look up but he’s kicked his fair share of sullen ass in his day. If it comes to it he would pit his muscle against Monty Savage any day.

Hopefully he won’t be hanging around here long enough for things to go that sour.

“Thanks, Loren,” he says, still holding Monty’s gaze until Monty smirks, drops his eyes and looks to the west where the sun is beginning to dip low.

They’ve reached the far side of the brothel. Oscar can’t hear the voices of the adults any longer. The other Savage girls have disappeared. He watches Ren in the soft evening shadow and is struck by the sight of her. Even without makeup she has a face that demands attention. At the same time, a ray of sun filters through her loose cotton shirt and shows him the curve of her small breasts. Despite himself, despite the fact that this girl is off limits and he’s been inside of girls that could body double as porn stars, he recognizes pure fucking quality when it’s in front of him. Something stirs powerfully in his core and he shifts the weight of his luggage.

Ren suddenly gives him an arch look. Oscar wonders if she has supernatural dick sensors and can tell he’s getting a little chubby in his pants.

“What?” he says defensively.

She smiles. She has a perfect smile. Perfect teeth surrounded by perfect lips. “Thought you’d be more, I don’t know, European. That’s how we thought of you; Aunt Mina’s exotic little European waif.” She wrinkles her nose. “You seem like you could be from from L.A. Here’s the house. Door’s never locked.”

Oscar stops. “You said it was built for the caretaker?”

“Yeah, I think so. My grandparents, sorry our grandparents, were too busy being fabulous in Los Angeles to spend more than a few months a year out here so they paid some poor sucker to sit around and sweep up the dust. The rooms are really small in there but at least there’s central air. My father had it installed when we moved out here last year.”

“It looks like one of the rest stops we passed on the interstate.”

“It probably doesn’t smell any better either.” Ren’s voice takes on a defensive edge. “Look, I know it’s not what you’re used to and before we wound up here it wasn’t what we were used to either, but it’s still better than what a lot of people have.”

A vague sense of shame pricks at him. There he stands with his elite education and his pricey clothes while the Savage kids have been reduced to this. But why? Mina had once mentioned that August was very bad with money. He knows Atlantis was passed down from Rex Savage and he remembers his earlier thought about people who’d run out of options.

Who the hell is he to judge anyway? A former slum kid himself. He’s become a snobby jerk.

Ren is opening the door. “You could stay in the big house, but then you’d be under Lita’s thumb and I can tell you from experience that life is not comfortable there.”

“I’m sure this’ll be fine,” he says, following Ren inside as she fumbles for a light.

“Welcome home,” she says and Oscar glimpses beer cans, strewn clothing and some mismatched furnishings.

“Nice,” he says, dropping his bags in the tiny living room, figuring that’ll do until he finds out where he’ll be sleeping. Ren stands over by the light switch. Her arms are crossed and she watches him. Oscar has the feeling she is forming a series of opinions about him right then and there.

“New York,” he says, taking a step in her direction. “I was born in New York.” He looms over her, satisfied when she squirms. “And I’m not especially waif-like. Or little.”

“New York,” she repeats and Oscar can tell the news surprises her. “I didn’t know that.”

“Seems like it would have been easy enough to find out if you cared to look into it.”

She smiles again and damn if that devilish grin doesn’t do all kinds of crazy shit to him. “I guess I never cared, Oscar. Still, seems like the kind of thing you ought to know about your cousin.”

He leans into the wall just to the right of her, resisting the urge to touch a stray lock of dark hair that’s fallen into her eyes. “Usually my buddies call me Oz. And I’m not really your cousin, Ren.”

“That’s right, you’re not. Do you want to be?”

“Hell no.”

She nods. “Good.”

He can’t tell what she means by that. It isn’t a straight flirt. This girls isn’t full of all the games and plots that occupy other girls. Somehow he already knows this. He also knows that no matter what kind of strangeness has transpired in the last two days and no matter what this girl’s fucking last name is he wants to grab her and commit a series of dirty acts right here in the cramped living room.

Ren cocks her head and does a strange thing. She reaches out and tips his chin up. It isn’t sexy and isn’t supposed to be. It seems almost like a sorrowful gesture. Why the hell would Loren Savage feel sorry for him?

“Are you thirsty?” she asks, brushing past him and heading for the galley kitchen.

He follows her. “Depends. What kind of poison you offering?”

She flicks the tap and begins rinsing out a crystal wine glass. “Water. You want something stronger you’ll have to beg it off the boys or steal it from August. Actually if you ask him he’ll probably just give it to you.” She fills the glass and extends it. “We have water filtration even out here beyond civilization so you’re safe to drink from the tap if you don’t mind the dusty taste.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 658